


A Man's Word is His Bond

by howlsmovinglibrary



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: (or lack thereof), Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Mutual Pining, Romantic Soulmates, Slow Burn, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Zevran Arainai is the embodiment of "THAT'S MY WIFE" and I think that's very sexy of him, plus size warden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:53:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25589389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlsmovinglibrary/pseuds/howlsmovinglibrary
Summary: The Antivan Crows burned away Zevran’s soulmark long before he was old enough to read it.What Zevran didn’t realise - until much later - was that the Crows did not invent this technique. It was a practice originally cultivated by the Circles. Mages had their soulmates erased, lest the connection make them yearn too much for the world outside tower walls.--A soulmates AU featuring a disaster bisexual hot assassin boi, and his hypercompetent nerd wife (who is bad at feelings).
Relationships: Zevran Arainai/Female Surana, Zevran Arainai/Female Warden
Comments: 70
Kudos: 112





	1. Chapter One

The Antivan Crows burned away Zevran’s soulmark long before he was old enough to read it.

Later in his life, he accepted their logic. A soulmate was a weakness: a handy shortcut to your heart, a waiting target on the back of your head. All just conveniently written on your skin, readily available for exploitation by your enemies. 

Furthermore, seduction was also far easier when you didn’t have another person’s name on your wrist. In fact, he had a successful run of marks that he beguiled with a tragic tale of how he himself had burnt the name away, after the person in question died, _so many years_ before their time. 

Not having a soulmark was a blessing, in his line of work. It was hard to do many things, when you felt tethered to another. When it was only your soul you tarnished, it all felt much more straightforward.

What Zevran didn’t realise - until much later - was that the Crows did not invent this technique. It was a practice originally cultivated by the Circles. Mages had their soulmates erased, lest the connection make them yearn too much for the world outside tower walls.

The first time he saw her, it was like getting hit by a bolt of lightning. 

In fact, it was _exactly_ like getting hit by a bolt of lightning. A cloud of tempestuous purple energy rose from her outstretched hands to meet him, and he was pretty certain that this was the cause of nearly all subsequent confusion.

He lay on the ground afterward, stupefied and stunned, while they all stood around examining him. He wondered exactly what had possessed him to take on a woman whose party of five people and one dog could wipe out a contingency of seventeen mercenaries. Wasn’t that… a Qunari fighter, and... and a _golem_? He was pretty certain no one had mentioned long dead constructs of legend in his contract. The Crows would likely have charged far more, and put in a clause about requisitioning the artefact afterwards, if that was the case.

“Now Shale, please don’t stomp the nice assassin’s face until _after_ the interrogation,” came a tart, imperious voice that was entirely at odds with the woman that walked into his view. She was an unassuming thing: ruddy-skinned, short, and fat, with spectacles perched upon her flat, broad nose. Her jaw was red and puffy on one side, and a fresh cut lined her forehead, but otherwise she was unharmed. Dressed in thick woolen skirts and a purple tunic that added even more chunkiness to her figure, with a thick mane of chocolate brown hair that the points of her ears only just managed to peak out of, Nydhalan Surana looked less like a Grey Warden and more like a peasant who would raise chickens in a little cottage at the edge of a wood.

Well. It was time to save his skin, and if she looked like _that_ , it should be relatively easy. Zevran summoned his most winning smile, and said, “ooh, you’re a rather aggressive little minx, aren’t you? And lovely too.”

Behind her, the tall, blonde Warden sputtered. Zevran couldn’t help but think that this was rather offensive to his companion: Zev was of the opinion that all women should be treated as beautiful, even when they were not. But then, Nydhalan Surana was suddenly snorting with laughter as well, wrinkling her nose and causing her glasses to slip on her face.

“Maker,” she scoffed, covering her mouth with her hand, “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been referred to as a ‘minx’, and I can tell you for free that I hope it’s the very last. I still have stress dreams about the overdue library books under my bed. Pretty sure I couldn’t be a minx even if I tried.”

Zevran valiantly tried to recover the situation while the group cackled. “Then, I will call you whatever you like, and tell you whatever you want.”

“Goodness, then this will prove to be an incredibly unproductive interrogation.”

“Please. Let me save you some time: my name is Zevran, Zev to my friends,” for some reason, she locked up at that, so he decided not to push the ‘friends’ angle, too much. “I am a member of the Antivan Crows, brought here for the sole purpose of killing the remaining Grey Wardens. That is you, of course, which means I have failed, spectacularly.”

Nydhalan looked down at him like he’d grown an extra head - it really shouldn’t have surprised her that he was contracted to kill her, given that she’d also been there for it happening. “...Zevran?” she asked, sounding his name out uncertainly.

“Yes,” he replied. “Zevran Arainai.”

Her face was carefully impassive, in that way that immediately told him she was fighting a reaction. “Perhaps… you’ve heard of me?” he hazarded, though he couldn’t quite guess how.

“No,” she said, abruptly, dusting down her skirts in a picture of nonchalance. “But I’ve heard of the Antivan Crows. I thought they were famous for, well, being… _good_ assassins?”

“Ouch! Is that what you Fereldans do? Mock your prisoners? Such cruelty, for one so young.”

“Err… does this... usually work for you? Patronising people, and passing it off as flirting? I swear, if you call me a ‘minx’ again, your face gets immediately smushed.” With a dismissive wave of her hand, she looked up at the golem, whose face crunched and cracked and rearranged itself into something pleased. Then she looked down at him again, “who sent you, if you’re feeling in such a giving mood?”

“A rather taciturn fellow in the capital: Loghain, I believe. Rather sullen looking - terrible skin-care regime. Clearly gets very little sleep. I have no idea what his issue is with you. The usual, I imagine. You threaten his power, yes?”

“I mean, we’re trying our best,” Nydhalan muttered, adjusting her glasses. “I don’t suppose you have a vested interest in Alistair and I’s untimely demise, beyond the money I imagine was involved?”

“No, I’m hardly loyal to him. I was contracted to perform a service.”

“One you very much failed at.”

He winced and pantomimed a sting, watching as her face remained stoically unimpressed. “Yes, yes, I am well and truly defeated. No need to rub it in.”

“I’m guessing there’s no way that fucking up this badly ends well for you?”

“Not particularly,” he shrugged, then groaned in pain. “I mean, I rather expected it all to have ended already.”

“What can I say? I’m also very generous, and I do it without the innuendo, even. So now what? You’re bartering for... a next chapter?”

“Always, my lovely girl. Always.”

“Alright, that’s enough of that…” said the other Warden, his voice holding an edge.

“Oh really, Alistair, save the effort of posturing, I know he doesn’t mean any of it,” Nydhalan said pragmatically, patting her protector’s arm. She glanced down at Zevran again, “If we let you go, will you try again?”

“I mean, you let me go, you prove yourself extremely foolish, and that would certainly encourage a second attempt. But I have bigger things to worry about - I have exhausted the coin advanced me, and apparently you can take out a band of seventeen people no problem, which doesn’t bode well for a band of… well. One. I’m dead - or I should be, both in terms of what you should be doing with me right now, and in Loghain and the Crows’ eyes should I return empty-handed. It certainly makes me question how dedicated I am to this particular job.”

“Oh, my heart bleeds,” she said dryly. “Does this impending existential crisis lead to you… I don’t know, not wanting to kill people?”

“I’ve never really wanted to kill people, honestly. Have you always wanted to be a mage? You don’t get much of a choice in these things, when your body is bought or owned by another.”

“Maker’s breath!” she gave a slightly goofy, buck-toothed smile, then, like she found him amusing. Zevran knew he was amusing, just not normally in a way people found easy to mock. But... he supposed being mocked was one step further away from being dead. 

The Warden continued, “you know, before I did some proper research, most of what I knew about the Antivan Crows came from trashy romance novels, and it’s actually proving to be my most accurate source material. Are all you Crows overtly sexual men with mysteriously tragic backstories? Or did Loghain rent you out special?”

Zevran wondered exactly what these romance novels contained - if she’d been reading them, that implied she was interested in their contents, and in men like him, despite his current overtures falling on deaf ears. “You’re correct, of course,” he said, taking a blind swing and hoping for luck to be on his side, “I’ve read all those novels, too, as part of my Crow training. We get taught to recite our tragic backstories by rote whenever we find ourselves in life or death situations, or up against formidable women.”

Nydhalan Surana actually… chuckled, then. It was an adorable, if slightly horsey, sound, that ended in a snort. So, she would not accept ‘lovely’, but ‘formidable’ was agreeable. Zevran found himself grinning in response, but that very act seemed to sober her up, her face falling back into indifference.

“Truly, the Crows aren’t so bad,” he added, hastily, “they keep one well supplied. Wine, women, men. Whatever you happen to fancy. Though the whole severance package is garbage. If you were considering joining, I’d think twice about it.”

“Well,” she replied, “you should see what the Grey Wardens have in place. Not even the luxury of a swift, professional death for us, just infertility and a terminal illness. We do, however, have a dog.” She reached down and affectionately ruffled her mabari’s head.

“You are not giving the best sales pitch, my dear. In fact, it surprises me that you are giving it at all.”

“I’m just, you know… speeding this along,” the mage gestured between them, “you don’t want to attempt killing me and Ali again, but you die if you don’t fulfil your contract. I’m assuming you’ve come up with a magical third option that you’re just _desperate_ to tell me about.”

“Well, you are correct, again - I am quite fond of living. And you are obviously thoroughly difficult to kill, which means you are the sort to give the Crows pause. So. Let me serve you, instead. I’m suddenly very repentant about my terrible life choices, and the only way you get out of this profession is if you sign up with someone they can’t touch. Someone... like you.”

Alistair tilted his head, “...Um…?”

“Alistair makes an excellent point,” Nydhalan said, not really allowing the boy to speak. “You understand, your references leave a lot to be desired. As things currently stand, your success rate, to me, is at zero.”

“He also tried to kill us!”

“Yes, Alistair, we were all there.”

“Then... why are we even having this conversation?”

“Because he’s not a darkspawn, and he’s _obviously_ not a threat to our life,” she replied, “the ethics of the situation are suddenly a lot more complex.”

“I’d say it’s still very simple,” the gollum observed, looking at Zevran’s… well, his head.

Zevran hastily waved his hands in surrender, hopefully signaling his refusal to being squashed. “I very much want to live, my beautiful Warden foe, and you will quickly discover just how tenacious I can be when meeting my goals. I can protect myself, as well as you - not that, admittedly, you seem to need much help. Let me be of use to you. I am skilled in many things, from fighting to stealth to picking locks. I could also warn you should the Crows strike out again, make another attempt now that you’ve tarnished their honour and taken their best man from them?” 

Zevran could tell she looked a little unconvinced, so he added, “I could also just stand around and look pretty, if you prefer. Warm your bed? Fend of unwanted suitors? Provide dramatic readings of your lovely books? No?”

“Well, if you were looking for a professional niche even more useless than an assassin who can’t kill,” she sighed, “then I suppose offering to fend off suitors for a woman without any certainly works.”

“Excellent - I’m glad to hear it! That means less competition for me,” he said, and found he was only half joking. He smirked at his own predictable ways: he supposed he’d always relished a challenge. “There are worse things in life than serving the whims of a deadly sex goddess, I suppose.”

“Oh, do fuck off,” she sighed, while Alistair choked again behind her. The swear sounded vaguely ridiculous in her posh accent. “You were really doing so well, until then.”

“The first thing you’ll learn about working with me, dear Warden - I always take risks,” Zevran winked, “and they always pay off.”

“ _Clearly…_ ” said Alistair, glancing meaningfully around the corpse-filled clearing.

“I got to meet your lovely leader, did I not? I’m already considering it my step up in the world.”

Nydhalan looked around at her party. “Well, you lot: thoughts? Feelings? Comments and/or critiques?”

“The Antivan Crows are very well known,” the red-head woman behind her said thoughtfully, “if he truly is one, he must have some of the talents he claims.”

“And we already have Alistair,” pointed out an arch voice from the left, where a beautiful, porcelain skinned woman with an even fancier accent than Surana stood, picking at her nails. “‘Tis not like we can set the bar any lower for incompetence.”

While Alistair made a noise of protest, Nydhalan didn’t seem to hear the comment. She had clearly opened the discussion to the group in order to take the opportunity to stare at him. It was a type of stare he was very used to: assessing, distrustful, calculating. The one that weighed up the pros and cons of his person. But something was soft in her expression. He couldn’t work out if it was her glasses, or just the natural set of her face, but it wasn’t anywhere near as mercenary as it would’ve been had a Crow delivered it. When she finally noticed him noticing her stare and caught his gaze, something tightened in her face and she hurriedly looked away.

 _Ah,_ he thought, _not quite a formidable as she likes to pretend._

“...I accept your offer,” she said, suddenly. Her words were sure, but her expression was wary, like she thought it was a decision she’d regret. “Of service. Not all the other ridiculous garbage and _especially_ not the prostitution. But… you can come with us.”

“You really think we should take an _assassin_ with us? Because he’s asked nicely and called you a _sex goddess_?”

“Goodness! Yes, Alistair, one blatantly theatrical flirtation while I’m the only thing standing between him and death’s door, and I’ve completely forgotten that he tried to kill me all of five minutes ago! Instead I’ve decided to just throw caution, and my maidenhead, to the wind!” she exclaimed, impatiently, though Zevran was pleased to notice she wasn’t quite as unruffled as she acted, with a blush colouring both cheeks. “Why, my brain is completely in service to my vagina! Just this morning, one look at Morrigan’s undercarriage caused me to drop my entire breakfast - oh wait, wasn’t that you...?”

“Yes, yes, fine!” Alistair all but squeaked, squirming in his shiny armour. Zevran grinned. He quite liked his Warden.

 _His_ Warden? Where had that thought come from?

“The fact is, regardless of how awful he obviously is at ambushes, Leliana is right: the Crows are actually quite a prestigious order,” Nydhalan continued, almost like she was rationalising the decision for herself. “I’m not about to look an expensive gift-assassin in the mouth - I remain very much in favour of all my murder getting done by proxy. The more people with pointy things between me and the enemy, the better. And look at how many knives the nice man has! If I hadn’t knocked him unconscious almost immediately, I’m sure he’d have made good use of them.”

“If there was a sign we were desperate, I think it just knocked on our door and said hello,” Alistair muttered.

“Honestly, I rather think you were at that point when Duncan knocked on _my_ door and said hello, and look how well that’s turned out for us all,” Nydhalan said with a sigh. Zevran thought that she was being a little unfair on herself - the impact of her spell had floored him instantaneously, and he’d fought and killed mages before. 

“Shale, no smushing today,” she said, as the golem moved back with a disappointed, crunching sound. She looked down at him, pushed her glasses up her nose decisively, and then held out her hand. He reached up and clasped it - her hands were papery soft, again at odds with her rustic appearance. 

Driven by some impulse he couldn’t explain, he smoothed his thumb across her knuckles, and she raised an eyebrow, entirely unimpressed, before tugging him to his feet with an unladylike grunt. She dropped his hand almost immediately and wiped it on her skirts, like it was dirty.

Her meaty chunk of a dog growled at him, hackles raising. She silenced it with a single look, “down, Cathaire.”

Not the warmest welcome. Still, Zevran was not one to take disdain to heart. He’d win them both over, yet. “I hereby pledge my oath of loyalty to you, lovely Nydhalan,” he said, rolling the beautiful syllables of her name as he made a courtly bow in her direction, “until such a time as you choose to release me from it. I am your man, without reservation… this I swear.”

Nydhalan had gone bright red and wide-eyed at this pronouncement, which seemed to have more effect on her than all of his compliments combined. Zevran avidly watched her mortified and flustered reaction play out across her face, almost as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. Perhaps she had… a taste for fealty, and liked to be served? She certainly had a bossy enough tone to warrant it, and there were plenty of romance novels in the world that would feed such a complex.

But the illusion - nay, the incipient fantasy - was shattered almost immediately, when Alistair let out a snort, “ _Nydhalan?_ Your name is ‘Nydhalan’?!”

“What a lovely name!” gasped Leliana. “Why don’t you use it? It’s so beautiful.”

“That is _not_ my name,” the Warden said suddenly, her voice horrified. “I mean, yes, it is, but only because the mage who named me got a bit carried away with her new elven foundling and decided she wanted to give it a culturally appropriate name, and then for some fucking reason chose one from one of those awful Elvhenan Mystery Plays. Never mind that they plucked me out of a slum in Jader, and a name like ‘Lucy’ would’ve served just as well.”

“I’m… afraid I am mistaken, then,” Zevran said. “I was called out on a contract for Nydhalan Surana.”

“Please stop saying that,” she said, visibly shuddering, “it’s not… Nydhalan.”

She looked him directly in the eyes, and now he was close to her, he noticed for the first time that they were bright, moss green, that seemed almost familiar, like something he’d glimpsed in a dream.

“It’s just Nyd.”

“...Ned?” he said, with a little despair. It was a far less pleasant sounding name for a person.

“Pretty much.” The mage said with a shrug. She scratched her nose, pushed up her glasses again in a gesture he now realised was a nervous habit. “And just so you know - if you try running away, or perhaps killing me in my bedroll? Shale is our guard… and she doesn’t actually sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! This is a short 35k side-project that I wrote when I needed a break from my main fic. It's already complete, so editing/posting it shouldn't intervene with the posting chapters for Eye of Storm!
> 
> What you need to know:
> 
> \- This is a different worldstate to my Inquisition fic, with different pairings and a different Hero of Ferelden, so there's no crossover with my other work  
> \- This is 'slowburn' but like, it gets resolved in under 1/10th of the wordcount of my other work so... does it really count?  
> \- I've marked this as 'mature' because it gets marginally more sexy than my other fic, but there's nothing I would consider Actual Smut so don't come here for that!  
> \- I will be trying to post at least one chapter a week but I will be prioritising my other fic so that may slip a little.
> 
> Nydhalan is a name taken from Project Elvhen by fenxshiral!


	2. Chapter Two

Nyd Surana did not talk to Zevran very much. But Nyd Surana talked, _a lot_.

For someone freshly turned twenty, five years younger than him, she knew - or at least thought she knew - so very, very much. She argued with Morrigan over magic. She argued with Leliana about elves, and Orlesian politics as she’d read it in books. She argued with Alistair about… _everything_ \- what their plans for action were, who they should contact first and who should do the talking (as if Nyd didn’t already do all of the talking, all of the time), who should do the dishes, what the best cheese was. They bickered with each other with the familiarity of siblings, rather than two people who had been but a month in each other’s company. 

She told them many stories about her time in the Circle. She recounted random facts and portions of history seemingly to the air, and was constantly regaling Leliana with plots from novels she’d read, while Morrigan studiously pretended to not be interested. It was rather surprising to Zevran when he found out that _Leliana_ was actually the bard.

Her snotty, academically cultured voice was the sound that woke Zevran nearly every morning, as she cooed at her dog and fed it scraps, and he blinked up at the canvas overhead and tried to remember who he’d been holding in his dreams. She even insisted on talking with the stoic-faced Qunari and the golem every morning, asking them how they were, even though her questions only ever earned one syllable answers.

But still, she would not talk to him, unless she absolutely had to. 

“Good morning,” she would say, in a perfunctory and dutiful manner, once he dressed and left his tent. He had already considered seeing what her reaction to him shirtless would be, but things were still too tentative, at this stage. He’d rather not face death-by-golem simply because a sexually repressed mage’s pride was wounded.

“And what a beautiful morning it is, my dear Warden,” he would reply, or something to that effect, looking up through his eyelashes at her. Then, as an invitation to start a conversation, he would say, “I had the most wonderful dream.”

“That’s nice, for you.” Was her prim response, and then Cathaire the dog would go back to holding the foremost part of her attentions, or Alistair would make another pronouncement about cheese that she fundamentally disagreed with. And Zevran would be left, forgotten, always watching her.

The first time he saved her from bandits on the road, she didn’t even look at him. He didn’t know what instinct triggered his desire to look back after he dispatched the enemy’s vanguard, but even as he turned his head he heard a small yelp, like she’d stepped into cold water. In reality, he saw her trying to fend off a swordsman with her staff, and failing, because said staff was made of wood, and the sword in question almost as tall as her. And then he was moving, sprinting down the path and leaping onto the man’s back, knives plunging into the tendons in his shoulders through the gaps in his armour. The man collapsed immediately, crumpling like wet clothes in a laundry basket. 

When Zevran pulled himself off the man, breathing raggedly and confused by his own sense of urgency, Nyd had already turned away and lobbed a fireball at the assailant currently engaging Leliana. That could perhaps be explained away by the heat of battle, but she didn’t even say thank you afterwards. All his rescue earned him was the blithe comment: “so, that ambush with us, then - a one-off blip in your career, was it?”

That night, Zevran found himself wondering, _what did it take to get this woman’s attention?_ After three weeks listening to her near constant monologues with other people, he knew so very much about her - but she didn’t seem to care for learning anything about _him_. It was unnerving, to say the least. It wasn’t a question of trust. She’d turned away from him when he had both daggers drawn, which spoke volumes for exactly how much she considered him a threat to her life. 

But she didn’t accept him. She was deliberately holding him at arm’s length.

And that was frustrating, because for some reason, he really, _really_ wanted to talk to her about cheese. In his head, he had devised so many witty remarks he could add into her absurd conversations with Alistair. And he was so very, very _certain_ that every single one of them would startle another silly, horsey laugh out of her chest.

As they arrived at the outskirts of the Brecilian Forest, Nyd announced, “right. Fuck knows where we’re supposed to go. Zevran, you’re up.”

“Forgive me, my beautiful Warden, but if you are not the kind of elf to go by the name ‘Nydhalan’, then I am also not the kind of elf to know their way around Ferelden’s Dalish territory.” In truth, Zevran had a smidgen of Dalish heritage, on his mother’s side, but it was from the Northern clans, and Nyd didn’t need to know about it.

“Yes, funnily enough, I realised that, Mr. _Antivan_ Crow,” she said brusquely. “You are, however, the sneaky one - that is, the one who is not in metal armour or currently made of rocks - and so the joy of scouting ahead falls to you.”

“Surely you, or our darling Witch of the Wilds, can accompany me?” he trailed his eyes down her unarmoured form meaningfully, and she rolled her eyes and instinctively crossed her arms over her chest. “You can protect me, should I be menaced by our clansmen.”

“Oh, you expect me to go off alone with you, so that you can murder me amongst the trees?” Morrigan said disdainfully. “I think not.”

“Fine,” Nyd sighed. They’d all learnt not to argue with Morrigan’s recalcitrant moods, unless they happened to have anything shiny and silver on them as bribery. “I, the nearsighted, elephantine one, who spent her entire life inside a single building, rather than a literal _Wilderness_ , shall scout the forest with his Crowship. C’mon, Cath.”

Her hound let out a small ‘bork’, and the three of them began to edge into the treeline. 

In fact, Nyd was quite adept at sneaking, for an amateur. Zevran hazarded a guess that living in a Circle tower under templar guard actually taught you quite a lot about moving silently, and keeping an eye out for every potential threat. Plus, she was uncharacteristically - well, characteristically, for her interactions with him - silent, except for her short whistles to Cathaire, when he strayed too far from them.

“You do not like me, do you, Nyd Surana.” He observed, when half an hour had passed and they still hadn’t found anything, or said a single word to each other.

“Shush,” she said in response, rather proving his point.

“I wonder what it is you do not like? It’s such a rare occurrence for me, for a woman to find me distasteful, that I confess it holds some novelty.”

“You literally tried to kill me,” she replied. “Now shut up.”

“Really, that’s a needlessly cruel grudge to hold, considering I didn’t get a single swipe in. No scars mar your gorgeous face. Really, I am the injured party in that particular encounter! A single spell and I was completely floored - it was a truly embarrassing, and not at all accurate, display of my stamina. Am I resentful of the fact that I received one of my greatest humiliations at your hand? Not at all. I know when I have been beaten, by a truly impressive foe. And in response, I’ve made myself perfectly agreeable.”

“That last point is up for debate. Now can you _please_ stop talking, for like, one minute?”

Zevran decided that was a slightly hypocritical statement to come from the lovely and loquacious Nyd Surana, but he didn’t push his luck by pointing it out. 

“At this point, I rather think the only successful course of action is if we make enough noise for the Dalish come to us,” he replied breezily. “Luckily, most people are attracted to me at first sight, so this shouldn’t pose too much of a problem for us, once we are caught.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is, then?” Nyd groused. “I’m not immediately falling over myself to sleep with you, so you’ve decided to engage in a thrilling chase by annoying me out of my smalls?”

“Really, Nydhalan!” he laughed, delighted. “I am simply trying to hold a cordial conversation with you! If I am trying to sleep with you, or do anything regarding your smalls, trust me - you won’t need to ask! You’ll _know_. Of course, if you are so very desperate to be chased, you only have to request it nicely. I'm game!”

Red crept up the back of Nyd’s neck, and she reached up with her left arm to push her hair behind her ear. “Please don’t call me Nydhalan,” she said, tersely, evading the rest of the statement. Zevran glanced over at her, just in time to see her sleeve slip far enough to reveal her wrist.

Where her soulmark should’ve been, there was just a shiny, featureless patch of burnt skin, pink where the rest of her was brown, but long healed over. It was years old. He could probably date the exact moment in her life she had received it, because - in an act of pure, perverse irony that was not lost on him - the burn scar almost exactly matched his own.

Nyd saw his gaze snag on it, and she hastily dropped her hand, tugging her sleeve back into place. 

“Please don’t feel embarrassed on my account,” he said with an encouraging smile, removing his worn left glove and showing her his own erased mark without hesitation, in the hope it would foster some camaraderie between them. “We are matched, in that regard.”

His was less of a clean burn than hers, wrought by a natural rather than magical flame. The skin was marbled like someone had run their fingers through it while it was less than solid. 

“I know,” she said flatly, not bothering to look at it.

“Oh?”

“When I pulled you up to standing, in the clearing where we... met,” she said, her gaze pinned straight ahead. She pushed up her glasses on her nose, telling him how much it pained her to make the admission. “I checked then.”

“Ohoho, my dear Warden - we’ll make a Crow of you yet!” Zevran chuckled, truly admiring her show of cunning. She would’ve had to put her left hand out, deliberately, to have him offer his in response, and then angled him enough to reveal the wrist at the time, without him noticing. “Why? Were so you desperate to know if, in me, you’d found your soulmate? I suppose I should be flattered!”

He’d been planning to carry it off as a lighthearted joke, with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows. It was what you did, when you revealed you had no soulmark, and people were horrified on your behalf - looking at you as if they’d already see you die hopelessly alone, in front of their eyes. Zevran wasn’t sure why: many people never met their bonded partner, which seemed to him a far sadder fate than never having one in the first place. And of all the things he’d been, as a Crow forcibly wrenched from his soulmate by forces beyond his control, ‘lonely’ had very rarely been one of them.

But his joke caused Nyd to bodily flinch, like he’d struck her to the heart with a dagger. “Of course not,” she said, bitterly, unconsciously picking up her pace. “In what world would I ever entertain the notion that we might be bonded?”

He seemed to have offended her, so he tried to recover the situation. “Of course, of course, in what world would I ever be deserving of you, sweet Warden?” he grinned, “and who wishes to be tethered to simply one person? Certainly not I.”

Zevran quickly realised that the reason Nyd accepted the descriptor of ‘formidable’ without question was because there was no world in which it was hyperbolic flattery. Calling her such a thing was purely a statement of fact. He watched her soft, pudgy face become truly menacing as she shouted at Zathrian, a man with nearly a foot of height on her and apparently several centuries of age, _to stop_. Her unruly mane of hair, that he often heard Leliana tutt over, made sudden sense as it churned around her head like it was caught in a gale, and her eyes glowed. She summoned a storm from within her, and annihilated all those who stood in the way of peace. Afterward, the ground crackled under their feet, the grass burnt to a blackened crisp.

Really, Zevran reflected, he hadn’t stood a chance, back in that clearing. But it certainly would’ve been a beautiful way to go.

Afterwards, she was sullenly quiet. No doubt she was tired and drained, but there was something more to it than that. He watched her as she desperately attempted to fade into the background when the Dalish ran up to thank her, as if she truly expected anonymity hours after ending a centuries-old curse. She hunched in on herself, kept her gaze down, like the attention weighed on her, and let Alistair field the questions. Then, it reached the point where the contract needed to be negotiated, and the boy began to flounder and seem rather out of his depth. Face resigned, she took the reins once more out of duty. It was bizarre to watch her fidget and avoid eye contact, given that her tendency towards monologues within the party rather implied that she loved attention.

He thought that, perhaps, Nyd Surana was used to being seen as very intelligent, but not to being seen as a hero.

Though she would quickly have to acclimatise herself to the experience. It had taken her four days to secure the alliance of one of the powers she and Alistair both sought on their grand, world-saving quest. In Zevran’s eyes, it seemed Thedas would be saved and Blight-free come Satinalia, if everything carried on at this pace.

The Warden clearly couldn’t wait to leave the Dalish camp again. She declined all offers of feasts in her honour, despite Alistair’s protests. “They’ve got so little, Ali,” she said, as she hoisted her pack hastily onto her shoulders, “let’s just go.”

Zevran felt like this was awfully idealistic and impractical talk from the woman who never actually had to attempt hunting down their dinner - given that frozen or lightning-charred meat made for rather unpleasant campfire fair. But as always, no one questioned Nyd’s decision, and they were immediately on the road again.

Their next destination was Redcliffe. Zevran had tried to point out that the Fereldan Circle Tower at Kinloch Hold was actually closer to their current location. He hadn’t even gotten the full sentence out before everyone in the group bar Nyd was glaring at him, while the mage herself scuffed her feet across the dirt. Even Sten looked at him with something approaching censure, and spent the evening quietly with the Warden and her dog. It seemed that the Circle made for something of a touchy subject, but Zevran supposed a nobleman’s house was a more desirable location anyway, in terms of the kind of hospitality they might receive. Perhaps, he thought wistfully, there would be _beds_.

That night, as they camped in the foothills of the forest and he thought longingly of horses and carriages, something unexpectedly encroached on his peace. He looked up from where he sat at the mouth of his tent, to see Nyd standing in front of him, looking for all the world like she didn’t want to be there.

“Darling Warden, you actively seek me out? At night time, in my place of residence, no less? People will surely talk!” he smiled, tilting his head at what he knew to be its best angle, “to what do I owe this undeniable pleasure?”

She let out a huff, shoulders slumping. “There’s no need for all that,” she said, business-like. “I got you something. Here.”

She shoved a cloth wrapped bundle into his hands. Zevran had seen her and Alistair shaking down every corpse like their livelihood depended on it for over a month now, so he was both a little disappointed and a little relieved when he opened the rags to find a pair of gloves. They did not smell like death, but neither were they made of gold, which had rather been his hope.

"Gloves? You're giving me gloves? What for?"

“I found them in that box you couldn’t unlock, in the woods,” Nyd said, scratching her head. “Leliana’s been teaching me to pick locks.”

“Ah, so you are simply handing me another reminder of my incompetency?” Zevran supposed he had embellished his credentials in that regard. Safes were actually his speciality, given that a lot of his assignments had involved stealing documents from nobleman’s caches. Normal locks, well… if he’d faced a locked door, he’d always found some other way to be let in.

“No! It’s just... look, they're Dalish gloves. Fancy. And I know you’re not Dalish, I just… I had a feeling you might like them,” she said, “they… reminded me of you. And no offence, but your current pair are falling apart.”

Zevran looked down at the glove she’d handed to him - _really_ looked. The leather was soft and supple, with a leaf green embroidered border that was a little gaudy, but clearly finely made. Knowing they were Dalish, he noted some aching similarities. These were dark where his mother’s had been tan, lined with rabbit rather than fox fur. Hers had had golden filigree along the wrists. They’d been softer and thinner, so that you could feel the heat of her hand behind them. But the leather was the same buttery smoothness, the stitches fine and indistinguishable, a true mark of their craftsmanship. 

But Nyd didn’t know about his mother - he hadn’t told her. So why, exactly, had she given these to _him?_ He glanced at the Warden’s own hands, which, as the weather turned, were becoming chapped and dry. Her gloves clearly weren’t doing too well either. He wondered if she got cold.

“I - thank you,” he said. “They’re… well, they’re beautiful. And they actually remind me of home. I don’t think I told you, but my mother was Dalish. She had gloves, just like these.”

Something spasmed across Nyd’s face then, the kind of look you made when you realised you’d made a mistake, and were only seeing it with hindsight. She looked both surprised and extremely angry at herself.

“No,” she said, quiet and resigned. “I didn’t know that. About your mother.”

“I mean, why would you? She left her clan when she met my father, and I never met her family. Never wanted to. Her stories were all very romantic, but really, who wants to live amongst the trees? Not me.”

“Look.” she said, her voice taking that brusque, defensive tone again, “I just thought you needed some new gloves.”

It seemed she didn’t appreciate them having any kind of personal intimacy. Zevran couldn’t help but feel slightly wounded by that, so he did what he always did when a situation didn’t seem to be going his way: he flirted. 

“And you simply wanted to see me donned all in leather? Of course, I understand, dearest, who wouldn’t? We have no need to delve any deeper than that.” He took his own gloves off and put the new ones on, before he even entertained the idea of suggesting she wear them instead. He flexed his fingers in the material, and then rested his chin in his hands, looking up at her, “they are quite handsome, no?”

She rolled her eyes, and pushed her glasses up her nose. “They are some very nice... _gloves_ ,” she stressed.

“Cruel to the last, my tempestuous goddess,” he grinned. “Still, I appreciate the fact you even thought of me. No one has simply… given me a gift before. Thank you.”

She fidgeted and nodded, still trying to act like this was some kind of business transaction, but then didn’t move away or say goodbye. Zevran would've sighed aloud, if it wasn't rude to do so. Talking was so very _difficult_ , when the other person refused to respond to you. All his usual tactics were failing. He wondered if he took her hand now - kissed it - how she would react? Probably by punching him, which wouldn’t remedy the issue.

“I’m glad you like them,” she said, suddenly. 

He glanced down at his hands. “I mean, it’s not gold, which tends to be my favourite kind of gift…”

“Well, I’ll get you gold next time.”

“Next time?”

“Ali and I aren’t really able to pay you, and we’ve got you - you and everyone - traipsing across the countryside without complaint… well, maybe a little complaint, particularly if you’re Morrigan. I know it’s not much, but the least I can do is get you some gifts along the way. You swore yourself into my service, and at the end of the day you’re a mercenary. I should pay you however I can.”

The sting of her reducing their relationship to a solely professional one, combined with the very obvious and foolish openings for interpretation that she left in her speech, meant that Zevran pettily relished his response. “I mean, my darling Nydhalan, I can think of many means of payment that have nothing to do with gold…”

Impulsively, he reached out his newly gloved hand, and used a trick he was sure his whore mother would have performed while wearing her own pair - stroking a single, soft fingertip up the inside of an exposed wrist, smooth as a whisper.

Nyd snatched her hand away like he’d burnt her, bristling like a cat as her face went indignantly red. He tilted his head curiously, as he took in the bodily force of her reaction.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” she all but spat, throwing up her hands. “Stop _... stop calling me fucking Nydhalan!_ ”

And though Zevran made a show of grinning triumphantly as she stomped away, he couldn’t help the sinking feeling in his chest as he wondered, again, why in the Maker’s name _it hadn’t worked._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor poor Zevran. I hope everyone is having a funner time with this fic than he is xx


	3. Chapter Three

By the time they made it to Redcliffe, Nyd had begun to accept Zevran’s overtures of friendship. Which mostly meant: she tolerated him joining in her arguments with others… so long as he supported her side.

Which honestly, he often did. And so, he got to talk a lot more.

By the time they reached Lake Calenhad's shores, she had warmed enough to him that their morning conversation extended beyond pleasantries, though he noticed she still never inquired as to the nature of his dreams.

It was therefore slightly jarring when, on the threshold of the Circle that had once been her home, her exterior froze over like a lake in winter. Her shoulders hunched and posture bowed, a snail retracting into its shell. Spiky and pricklier than even Morrigan, the only person whom she acknowledged as they walked into the building was Alistair, when he gently touched her arm in reassurance.

It was a strange transformation to watch. He would’ve expected her to be in her element, in this place where she’d learnt all those things she liked to talk about for hours and hours every day. 

Everyone knew she had not wanted to come here. Had they not already known, it would've been obvious from the way her face fell when she realised it was the only surefire way to save the life of the Redcliffe heir. And Zevran understood her reticence, he supposed - the templars in Antiva were easy enough to bribe and buy off, but that often meant many of them were happy to be bastards for free. 

What he didn’t quite understand was her fear. He knew Nyd was more than capable of taking them all down, should it come to that.

It was about halfway through their conversation with the Knight Commander that Nydhalan seemed to come to this realisation herself. Zevran noted the exact moment when it finally dawned on her that she was no longer a student, cowed to obedient complacency, but a Warden: a free agent who’d fought now in five battles, and had survived them all.

It was an easy moment to note, honestly, because it was when she stopped listening to what the old man was saying, and instead started telling him where he could ‘shove his Right of Annulment’.

He couldn’t stop smiling as, doing what she did best, Nydhalan argued for her right to enter the Circle. “Irving _has_ to be in there,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t just let them kill us all because they’re too lazy to look for him. Why is it that whenever templars are involved, wholesale slaughter is the go-to solution? Zevran, Alistair, Leliana - you’re with me. Sten and Shale you… guard the doors. Stop the Knight Captain from getting any ideas about when exactly annulment becomes a viable course of action. Morrigan, you’re lookout. If any fuckery starts, you send a wisp my way, we come back and take them all out.”

“While I immediately get murdered on the spot for being an apostate? Sounds like a wonderful plan.”

“Hey, if you want to go full-spider and munch on some of them in the meantime, I really, really will not stop you.” 

Nydhalan was still muttering things about ‘fucking templars’ as she stomped into the tower and the doors swung shut behind them. She fell silent, however, when she began to see the ruined remnants of what was once her home. Furniture lay smashed and splintered, parchment spread in mangled, bloodstained piles across the floor. "Maker," he heard her whisper, as she nudged a templar corpse with her toe. "They really did it."

A few rooms further in, and they found an monastic-looking old woman, fighting off a rage demon with the help of a few of the younger apprentices.

“Oh, bollocks.” Nyd swore softly.

“Nydhalan?” The woman said, as she turned away from the disintegrating beast. Zevran watched the way the Warden cringed at her full name, “is that you?”

“Wynne,” she said, with a palpable reluctance. When she saw Zevran raising a quizzical eyebrow at her, she muttered out of the corner of her mouth, “guess who the over-enthusiastic, culturally sensitive human who gave me my name was?”

Still, the Warden acquiesced to a hug from the older woman, who smoothed back her hair and smiled like a kindly grandmother down at her. Plans were explained, and introductions were made. 

“Oh, you’re the nice templar lad that they kept sending to us in a bid to get our knickers in a twist,” Wynne said to Alistair, patting him on the shoulder. “It is good to see you made it through. I truly thought all the Wardens were gone. Are you all bearers of the Grey?”

“No, Leliana and -” Nydhalan suddenly, inexplicably froze up, tripping over the words she was about to say before continuing with what was obviously an entirely new sentence, “Alistair and I are the only Wardens. The rest of my party follows me out of choice, not because of duty or blood ties.”

Given that her deflection had not been particularly agile, the elderly mage noticed what she had omitted. “And may I ask the identity of your final companion... assuming that you are not 'Leliana'?” she asked, turning to Zevran with the manner of someone’s mother standing in the doorframe, assessing a new arrival before they allowed their child to go out and play.

“I am-”

“He’s a friend!” Nyd blurted, cutting Zevran off halfway through his introduction. He cast her a confused glance - both as to why she interrupted him, and also the fact that she referred to him as a ‘friend’, without ever indicating, prior to this moment, that that was actually the case.

“Oh?” said Wynne, unimpressed and unperturbed, “and does this friend have a name, Nydhalan?”

“I-”

“Zevran Arainai,” Zev said, cutting Nyd off, this time, smirking as she glared. He bowed to Wynne in the same courtly manner with which he’d delivered his oath to her student. What could he say? Women usually loved it.

“Zevran,” Wynne sounded out the name. There was a pause, and she then gave Nyd something of an alarmed glance, that Nyd pretended not to see. It was obvious she had though, because she reached up and pushed her glasses up her nose nervously.

“He’s an Antivan Crow,” she blurted, “ _was_ an Antivan Crow. Sort of still is. We met by chance. Well, not chance. He tried to kill me, actually. Now we have a contract. Not the assassin kind! The employee-employer kind. It’s all very business-like. I couldn’t really turn away allies. He’s _excellent_ at stabbing things.”

Zevran watched with equal parts amusement and bemusement at the flustered, stuttering explanation that poured forth. Nydhalan suddenly seemed very much to act her age, and he had no idea if it was Wynne’s effect on her, or his. 

“It is true, ma’am,” he interjected, and the look Nyd sent his way was long-suffering, like she’d have preferred him to remain silent. “Both her assessment of my skills, and of our relationship. It is a thoroughly professional one... I can attest to the fact that she has virtuously spurned _all_ of my advances.”

He was pleasantly surprised that Nyd didn’t fireball him, there and then.

Pain, sharp and fresh, and familiar.

A face looming overhead, warping in and out of focus. “We’re not going easy on you, trust me.”

“No, I wouldn’t… want you to hold back,” said Zevran, gritting his teeth against the taut agony and turning it into a smile, giving them the performance they wanted. “In fact, I’d be disappointed if you did.”

The sky above him churned with purples, pinks, and sickly greens, all mixing together to somehow create a uniform grey that caused spots to form in his vision when he looked at it for too long. These kinds of exercises were normally conducted in dank, rotting basements that smelt like piss, however, so he was not about to complain.

“This one has spirit!” his tutor leered down at him, “It’s a shame we have to break him.”

“Like fuck you do!” came an familiarly impetuous, snotty voice, from outside Zevran’s line of vision, “get the fuck away from him!”

Zevran turned his head woozily to see a thunderous looking Nydhalan Surana, storming towards them with her staff in it’s habitual ‘about to bash skulls in’ position. It was only then that his positioning began to make him feel uncomfortable. For both him and these men, this exercise in torture was a mundane, everyday occurrence, but it was undoubtedly going to worry Nyd’s delicate sensibilities.

“What… what are you doing here?” he murmured, “you’re… not supposed to be here.”

“I know,” she said, glancing down at him. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, and it meant he could see all the horror and pity in her forest green eyes as she took in the scene in front of her. She really had quite a beautiful face - that is, it was thoroughly homely and nothing about it was actually beautiful, but he found he liked it all the same. “I shouldn’t have got to you this quickly - the others are hidden and blocked off from me. I think… well. I think I was meant to have been transported somewhere else, if I’m understanding the structure of this puzzle correctly. But I’m guessing maybe… there’s another magical force that overwhelmed the rules already in play. So now I’m here. With you. And your weirdly kinky tormentors. Maker’s balls, let’s get you out of here.”

“I can’t go now, Nydhalan. I’m so close…” he said.

“Not helping, with the kinky element.”

He laughed, then gasped in pain when he realised that was a grievous mistake. “I like the way you think, dear Warden, but… I need to stay here, you understand. Stay strong. This is my test. I am going to be a Crow - it’s my destiny. I need to show them that I can tolerate… pain. I want to do this. I need to do this.”

“Oh, Zevran,” her voice was sad. “You’re… well, you’re already an Antivan Crow.”

Her name in his mouth tugged at something in his chest, and worked to clear the fog in his head. He’d been inducted into the Crows when he was sixteen… he didn’t feel sixteen, anymore. And Nydhalan… he remembered meeting Nydhalan on a job. A contract. She’d knocked him unconscious.

“You speak the truth,” he said. “So, this is a bad dream then? A memory?”

“The boy is questioning us,” his tutor said, in the same, warning tones they’d always used in response to his running commentaries during these sessions. “That’s a very, very bad thing to do, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes, he’s been so very, very _naughty_. And I’ve suddenly got an insight into why he deflects everything with innuendo, as well as entire thesis I could write on the relationship between sex and death in the Crows’ apparent training regime,” Nydhalan said, her acerbic voice brimming with barely contained fury. She opened her palm, and suddenly the temperature dropped twenty degrees as thick, white vapour began to pour out of it, and the very water in the air seemed to become ice. “Now drop the guise, and kindly fuck off and _away from him_.”

Zevran called out to her, begging her to stop - his tutors could be so very cruel, when you defied them. But suddenly his tutors weren’t tutors, they were demons, and he now had a front row seat to watch her dispatch them both. Even he had to admit he was quite surprised - and not a little aroused - when her figure fluctuated and shifted, and suddenly he was watching a gaunt-faced, armoured spirit rip a demon’s face off with its taloned hands and an animalistic shriek. Meanwhile, the other thrashed against the glowing bars of a magical prison she’d flung upon it. The restraints gradually shrank smaller, smaller… searing the demon's flesh within the radiant cage... until the cage was very, very small, and the demon was smouldering paste.

Demons destroyed in mere seconds, her spirit shape wavered and fell, and suddenly five-foot-nothing Nydhalan was standing there again, breathing raggedly. She stared down at Zevran, who could only stare back at her, dumbfounded. Hands shaking, she reached over and bent down over him. She slapped Zevran’s hands away when he tried to start shuffling his wrists out of his bindings, taking a dagger from a sheath at his hip and sawing through them instead. “Let me. Fade rope burn will still feel like rope burn, while you’re here.”

“You have experience in that area, do you? Perhaps you are not so out of place here in my dream, after all.”

“Zev, is now _really_ the time?”

“I’m just saying… you, me, a rack. There are worse things I could dream of in this world, and few that are better.”

“I’m just going to break this to you now: to any sane person, there is nothing even _remotely_ sexy about a rack.”

“Ah, darling Nydhalan, I know you are an innocent flower, but truly, you have so much to learn! It can really be quite bracing,” he informed her, flexing his hands as the bindings loosened, “a good racking!”

“Zev, I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s really, really not working.” 

She held out a hand, offering to pull him up to sitting. He interlocked her fingers with his own, and at their first contact something _snapped_ in the air around them. 

Suddenly, the quality of the dreamscape around him shifted into clearer focus, like he himself had donned Nyd’s glasses. He saw patterns in the shifting air above them, and the startled Nyd was now limned with silver energy, which he supposed was standard practice for mages when they resided in the Fade.

“I love your eyes, you know,” he informed her, feeling that it was important that she also be party to this information. She blinked owlishly at him, all emerald irises and long, dark lashes, but for the first time couldn’t seem to find a dismissive retort. She reached a finger up to push her glasses up her nose, only to find they of course weren’t there.

Then something tugged at Zevran’s chest, like he was a fish on a hook, and the world began to haze out again. Zevran wondered if the torture had left him lightheaded, but a mist seemed to be filling the space between them, obscuring her and only her from view. “Where are you going?” he asked, hating how plaintive he sounded, “you only just found me!”

Nyd looked equally scared to have him disappear on her. “No, you can’t have him!” she snapped at the air, as if she could boss it into submission the way she did Alistair. 

Suddenly a silver tether snapped out from the aura surrounding her and shoved its way under Zevran’s skin, reaching the same place where the fishhook was and starting a battle of wills. It won. As if it were a rope tied around his midriff, his connection to her yanked him out from the mist and towards her body. Their hands still clasped, the connection felt as heavy as an anchor, and it tugged him from and off the rack, as if they were on the deck of a ship that had just listed sharply in her direction. He fell against her and she couldn’t bear his weight. They landed on the floor, his body pressing her into the ground.

While he struggled to calibrate this alarmingly close contact and the fact she was even allowing it to happen, the world dissolved around them. There was a wave of heat, and a new roaring filled his ears as the scene shifted. The two of them found themselves collapsed in a delicious heap on the floor of a burning structure, flames arching up to the ceiling all around them. The light from the fire created coppery patterns of light all across Nydhalan’s riot of hair as she looked up at him, clearly also at a loss regarding this sudden turn of events.

“I think…” she said, squinting against the bright light as she glanced around with a pouting frown, “I bought you with me… to the next stage of the puzzle. I don’t think I should be able to do that. I might have rather scrambled the order of things.”

Zevran was mostly just relishing the fact that her first words to him had not been a demand for him to remove himself from her person. He reached out, and tugged a strand of her hair out of her eyes, “I find that the maintenance of order is often overrated.”

“This place… it’s been twisted into almost a puzzle box, which means order is actually _very, very important_. The demon must be very powerful, to do such a thing. It’s had time to… to… _build_. Unpicking it is going to almost be like a cat’s cradle. I believe I have to collect souls which will unlock other areas. That’s what the… um… spirit transformation was. It’s rather handy. I’d say you could have some extra forms too but…” she sighed, “I’m currently the only one who can turn into a mouse, and I have a feeling that that’s a rather essential criteria. If I’d known you would be accompanying me...” 

By this point in one of her habitual lectures, Zevran had rather lost interest and was instead preoccupying himself with memorising just how very _soft_ her stocky, rugged body proved to be, once it was experienced in close quarters. She seemed to notice the way he was looking at her, and sighed, “oh, do get off me.”

And so, Zevran found himself committed to several, _very enjoyable_ hours of watching Nydhalan cycle through several forms - from a spirit to a burning skeleton to a _golem_ \- and promptly wreck her way through the halls of endless Fade palaces. He was there with his daggers of course, and Nyd asked him to scout ahead down a few of the corridors - Zevran guessed because she thought it would help him to feel useful. He wasn’t actually bothered by having her do nearly all of the work, while he simply stood back and marvelled at her array of newly acquired skills. Mages could be so very _useful_ , and terrifyingly powerful in a way he’d never really appreciated before.

And every time she annihilated all their assailants and they needed to move on, she ran back to him, took his hand, and transported the both of them together, for fear of leaving him behind. He wasn’t sure why exactly - other than the fact that being left in the Fade was obviously bad. At this point, it seemed like he was just a very enthusiastic audience member - he didn’t contribute anything meaningful, apart from effusive compliments she pretended not to enjoy.

After everything was done, Zevran sat on the stone floor of the Circle tower, amongst the splintered bookshelves, crumpled papers, and bloodstains, scowling at his feet.

Their rescue of the Grand Enchanter had earned them an overnight stay. The man Irving - who had patted Nydhalan on her head exactly four times since coming back to consciousness, as if she was a mabari like her Cathaire - needed time to be healed before he could travel with them to Redcliffe. That meant their bedrolls were laid out on the cold flagstones, and the ruined furniture shoved into a metal bin and used as kindling for a fire to keep them warm. Already, the windowless walls were starting to irk at him - had Nydhalan really spent twenty years in this lightless prison?

That wasn’t why he was scowling, though. Nydhalan had insisted on going to check on the templar recruit they’d rescued from the upper floors, concerned for his wellbeing despite all the horrible insults the boy had hurled at her when half-mad and protected behind by his barrier. That barrier had been the only thing stopping Zevran from throttling him... but she said she wanted to see if he was ok. Zevran had only begun to take issue when he realised that she actually _wanted_ him unscathed and uninjured.

He told himself that her interest was simply a manifestation of her foolish heroic tendencies, and nothing to do with the infatuation the boy - who he supposed was attractive, if you liked your vanilla farm boy types - had hinted at. Those poisonous words spat at her in a frenzy hadn’t spoken of affection, only obsession, and Nydhalan had seemed as surprised by the outburst as anyone else. “Um, but I've never actually... talked to you?” she’d squeaked in a high pitched voice, clearly unused to gentleman’s declarations. “...Weren’t you the one who was supposed to... decapitate me? If my Harrowing went wrong?”

Nyd was gone a long time. Zevran stayed up, waiting, as one by one the rest of the party either fell asleep or - in the case of Shale - walked off to explore the remains of the tower. When the Warden returned, he was the only one there.

“Oh - why are you still up?” she said, abruptly, her voice unspeakably tired. She’d changed out of the clothes that they’d worn when storming the tower, and instead wore a borrowed white shirt that swamped her frame and breeches that clung to it in turn.

“Is he… well?” Zevran asked, “you were gone a long time.”

“Who? Oh, you mean Cullen,” Nyd sighed, taking a seat in front of the fire in its wastepaper bucket and chafed her hands. “I only really saw him for like five minutes before Wynne dragged me into healing Irving but, no, he’s not well. He’s being kind of an arse, actually, and I don’t think accidentally confessing his ‘undying love’ to someone who had the bad luck to not be a vision has improved his mood.”

“Who knew you were such a heartbreaker, in your youth?”

Nyd snorted, “I promise you - not me. Apparently the man used to guard the library, which constitutes some kind of a ‘shared interest’ between us? I never really noticed him.”

“...Too busy reading steamy romances about dashing Antivan Crows?”

She gave him a stern look, pushing her glasses up her nose, “too busy reading. Period. You don’t go to the library with the aim of breaking bastard templars’ hearts.”

“So, Alistair is safe, then?” Zevran joked, taking the term literally.

“I mean, I’m not spending much time in libraries these days, I’m at such a loss for things to do,” she grinned, looking… almost mischievous. Zev found himself grinning back. “But Ali is already safe from me. Even if I wasn’t well, this…” she gestured to herself, as if _that_ was any kind of explanation. “He’s got his Eugenia.”

“...‘Eugenia’?”

“I know right? She sounds like an insipid bore,” Nyd sighed, “‘Eugenia Hawke’. He’s never met her and has no idea who she is, but that’s the name he’s been given. And bless his heart, he tries to tell me he isn’t waiting for her but he very, very obviously is.”

Zevran hadn’t known that - he hadn’t really delved too much into the soulmates of his new companions. For all her wonderfully skin-bearing outfits, Morrigan wrapped both her forearms from wrist to elbow, keeping anything written there obscured from view, undoubtedly for a reason. Sten just had a string of numbers, that he never commented on - it seemed he cared more about his missing sword, than whoever he was destined for. Shale… was a rock. As for Leliana, well, she hadn’t given him much choice in the matter - as soon as he questioned the veracity of her holy visions, she brandished her wrist at him. The name _Justinia V_ was written there. “It changed after my dream,” Leliana explained, “it was… someone else, before. Now, I know I will serve the Maker in my future, and that this is the first step on my journey.”

Zevran had pointed out that, if all her soulmate required was a bond of fealty, this conveniently meant that she was free to sleep with whoever she wanted. Leliana did not dignify this with a response.

“So, you are not on this lonely, heartbroken man’s wrist?” Zevran asked, already knowing that she wouldn’t be. There was no way that boy was good enough for her.

“You know… I really, _really_ didn’t check,” Nyd informed him, with a shudder.

Zevran gave her a knowing grin, “...I guess he’s not your type, darling Nydhalan?”

She scoffed. “As if I’d ever fuck a _templar_.”

Zevran was shocked into a laugh, loud enough that it echoed off the empty stone walls. 

Nydhalan grinned back almost despite herself, then fidgeted, tugging a strand of hair behind her ear as they fell into a somewhat companionable silence. It was hard to believe that a few hours before she’d been a stone golem, roaring and chucking boulders, flattening demons like they were toy soldiers. It was the most time the two of them had ever spent solely in each other’s company, and Zevran could not deny that it had been very, _very_ good fun.

Of course, thinking back to the Fade, Zevran was reminded of her, looking horrified at the sight of him strung up on the rack. The disappointing fact it hadn't awoken any carnal desires within her aside, it was an uncomfortable thing to know she had witnessed. They’d ventured into Wynne and Alistair’s own prisons afterwards, once Zevran had started to realise that Nydhalan was right - her interaction with him _had_ , very much, broken the order of things. Although both pocket dimensions had offered insights into the people they held prisoner, he’d been dismayed to see just how different in tone they were from his own. Alistair and Wynne’s prisons had spoken of hopes and fears of what was to come, not the darker aspects of what had already passed. It was a shame, really - it could’ve made for such good blackmail material. But Zevran was now left feeling like the only person who had the upper hand was Nyd... and it was over him.

He blinked out of his daze, from staring at the fire, to find Nydhalan watching him. Before, this would’ve counted as a moment of victory, but he didn't really like it. Whereas he’d often prided himself on being inscrutable, hidden behind a front of bravado, he felt like she’d just read everything that had passed through his mind.

“You know… I thought I was going to spend my life in the Circle,” she said, suddenly and quietly, not looking at him but instead up at the walls around them. “And when that’s all you’ve got ahead of you, you kind of… rationalise it. Learn to accept it. I decided that I _liked_ being safe and comfortable, that I liked not being able to leave the library. That all I wanted was to be the best mage in the Ferelden tower and make Irving proud, and that I was fine for that to be the limit of my ambition. When you’re trapped, you tell yourself that you’re doing what _you_ want, what _you've_ chosen to do, if only to have a margin of control.”

He understood, immediately, what she was really trying to say. He remembered what he had said to her, when he was trapped in the mindset of his younger self. _I need to stay here, you understand. Stay strong. This is my test. I am going to be a Crow - it’s my destiny..._

_I want to do this. I need to do this._

“That is the difference between us, then, my dear Warden,” he said, looking into the fire. “I never kidded myself that this life was my choice, and so enjoyed it honestly, for what it was.”

In a way, it was true that he had enjoyed it. Somewhat, in the end. Even the torture. There was something about the... challenge of it all. The theatricality. It was like a performance. He had learned to savour little acts of defiance, proving to everyone that he could endure whatever they threw at him. No one could question how strong you are, when they gave you so many chances to demonstrate it.

He looked up at her to see her frowning, clearly not convinced. “Ah, Nydhalan,” he sighed, “you think I am embarrassed! You think I am lying to you now, to save face. You want me to admit that every second was awful, and find that tragic backstory, hidden deep within my heart-breakingly beautiful exterior. Being a Crow... it is what it is. The torture was torture. I hated it. I survived it. You will be thankful that they did it, when the time comes. It makes me so very useful, at times.”

“I hate that,” she whispered. He glanced at her. He supposed he should not be surprised that she wanted to argue, when it was one of her most favourite pastimes, but he was surprised with the vehemence with which she glared back at him. “You’d have been just as useful without it, you idiot! And who cares if you weren’t useful in the first place?! That’s the kind of shit they give you about being a mage, too. That this,” she gestured around, “is all necessary so that we help, rather than threaten, society. That all of this is for our own good and makes us stronger, better people. You know, a lot of my time living here was great. I got three course meals twice a day if I wanted them, and my exam results meant I got first pick of dorms. I had friends I loved, and if I wanted to, I could spend every day reading whatever book I felt like. My magic is at least three times as powerful as Morrigan’s, who was taught by the _Witch of the Wilds_ , because all there was for me to do here was study, and be taught. It made me a fuck tonne more _useful_. Still didn’t get to go outside, though. So fuck that. Aren’t you angry?”

“...Not particularly,” Zevran said, though he would admit to some moments of indignant fury, in his youth. And now, staring at her, he was surprised that his voice didn’t come out entirely certain.

“Well, you should be,” she grumbled, crossing her arms. “I just want you to know, Zevran, that nothing that happened… there, in your memories, or whatever, was for your ‘own good’. Even if it means you save my life one day, I would still rather it had never taken place. You were perfectly fine, before it happened. You don’t need pain or suffering to make yourself a… stronger asset. Or a better person.”

They fell silent. Zevran was not really sure how to respond to that particular outburst. He _was_ an asset. He’d been a slave, and then a Crow, and now he was a hired soldier. She'd called him that herself. And he certainly was not very used to people - particularly people like Nydhalan, who did not seem to like him - defending his wellbeing. 

“Well, my dear Warden, I shall consider myself thoroughly scolded,” he replied, breezily, when a more intelligent response seemingly evaded him.

“I’m not - that’s not what I’m try to - I didn’t mean -”

“I know what you meant, Nydhalan,” he murmured, glancing over at her and, mercifully, silencing her. “You have given me much to think about. And for once, we have a roof over our heads, so I think I shall endeavour to get some sleep.”

He stood up, made a show of brushing himself down that demonstrated just how unruffled her speech had left him, and then started to walk away towards his bedroll.

“I don’t think anything less of you, you know,” she said, suddenly, voice very, very soft. “If… if you _were_ embarrassed. That I saw that. In the Fade. You know that I’ll… I’ll never use it against you. And I won’t tell anyone else about it, either.”

Zevran froze, for a second. He considered striding back in her direction, taking her glasses off her face, and kissing her full on the mouth. To ensure her silence. Because he wanted to. Because he… he wasn’t sure why. He’d never had to justify kissing a person, in the past.

Instead, he nodded once, silently, to show he had heard her, and simply walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lol, for someone who's main fic is Cullen x Inquisitor, I'm kind of mean to Cullen in this world state - I hope people don't mind! Read my other work if you want some Cullen love ;)
> 
> I've realised that I'm too desperate for attention and validation to keep this at one chapter a week, so I'm going to aim for two! See you again soon xx


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: internalised fatphobia

Wynne accompanied them to Redcliffe, and onwards to the Temple of Sacred Ashes after that. Zevran could tell that Nydhalan resented having the equivalent of her nursemaid as company, but condescending comments aside, the woman was an extremely accomplished healer. After watching her close up a stab wound in his side from a particularly infected darkspawn blade without leaving a scratch, Zevran was thoroughly in favour of her.

“You should become a healer too, darling Nydhalan,” he said, as he stood up and stretched out like a cat afterward. “Just think of it, an excuse to put your hands all over my body.”

“Morrigan’s mother could turn into a _dragon_ , Zev,” Nyd replied, not even looking up from where she was curled up in her tent entrance, reading the woman’s grimoire, brow furrowed and one hand holding a spill of her hair at bay. “I’m just saying, there are certain things one must aim for in life.”

“Is touching me not one of those goals? It comes highly recommended.”

“You’d probably let me, whether I was a healer or not,” she remarked absentmindedly, chewing on her lip as she concentrated. She still reacted to his flirting with matter-of-fact disinterest, but that was fine with him, because she also no longer asked him to stop. He could get away with a lot more, these days. It seemed like they... might actually be friends.

“It is true. And your bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired.” Zevran glanced over at Wynne, who’d been watching this entire exchange with a very unimpressed look, and winked, “our dear Warden is not as gentle as you, Wynne.”

“Indeed.” the mage said shortly, and with a flash of light ignited the bloody bandages she’d used to patch the wound.

It seemed that Nydhalan’s former mentor did not approve of his interest in her. He supposed he’d reached the point where he’d stopped being subtle about it, even for him. He knew his theatrical proclamations annoyed Alistair, amused Leliana, disgusted Morrigan, and well… admittedly meant nothing to either Shale or Sten. But he couldn’t stop. Ever since he’d watched her rip demons to shreds in the Fade, he’d had to admit a certain admiration for Nydhalan, that went beyond curiosity or amusement at her reactions when he pushed her too far. She was just so _powerful_ , and clever, and ambitious, and sure of herself in a way that was utterly different from himself.

He had confidence. She had certainty.

He liked her eyes. He liked her hair, as it grew wilder and wilder and formed occasional perfectly preserved curls amongst the unkempt frizz. He liked the face she pulled when she read one of the several books she’d stolen from the Circle’s library on their way out, brow furrowed, teeth gnawing on her lip. He loved her mouth, which he became convinced was the single perfect feature in her otherwise plain face - small but full lips, blush pink, with a freckle just above the dimple in the right side.

And still, no matter what he did, or what he said, and how much the rest of their party groaned and rolled their eyes, he got no reaction from Nydhalan herself.

It was a recipe for exquisite torture.

Three days before they reached Haven, squirrelled away in the mountains, he told her a tale of his escapades under the Crows’ employ that made her snort with laughter, as he’d hoped and knew it would. She was laughing so hard that she couldn’t look where she was going and tripped over the hem of her skirts, stumbling forward. He darted out and caught her by the arm, pulling her up and against him before she could fall. She was heavy, but he was strong. She blinked up at him from behind her glasses, startled by the sudden closeness, and he could feel her pulse thrumming like a hummingbird from where his hand encircled her wrist, even through his gloves.

He had no glib remark to smooth the situation over. Instead, he imagined hugging her to him, putting his arm around her waist, and burying his face in her hair, watching her grow flustered and utterly unable to cope with it.

“Maker’s balls,” she said finally, stepping away and disentangling from his grip, “sorry. You’ll put your back out, if you have to do that too often.”

“Crows are nothing if not limbre,” he joked, with a meaningful look that he hoped wouldn’t evade her notice for the thousandth time.

“Well, that’s just a rather lacklustre innuendo, Zevran,” she said, shaking her hair out of her face. “Clearly we’ve been travelling for far too long today, if that’s all you have left to give me.”

“There are plenty of other things-”

“- You could give me. Yes, I know. Including your very, very impressive penis, no doubt,” she finished for him. He blinked at her, and, miraculously, she smiled, beaming at him in smug satisfaction, “see? You’ve become predictable. Maybe we should call today’s route march to an end. Give you time to recover.” She waggled her eyebrows meaningfully in a parody of his own look, as if daring for him to turn that statement into something dirty as well.

She did not, in fact, bring their route march to an end, but he did find himself falling silent as she strolled up to Morrigan and began hammering out the finer points of shapeshifting with her. He’d known Nydhalan didn’t think he was actually interested in her, and was instead flirting just to tease and pass the time. He didn’t realise this had... somehow rendered her immune.

He thought of how loud her pulse had pounded under his fingertips. Well, maybe not _that_ immune.

That night, he couldn’t sleep, blinking in the darkness and willing his mind to quiet. He heard shuffling outside near the campfire, and a murmured conversation that grew ever closer.

“I am twenty, Wynne, not twelve,” hissed Nydhalan, with all of the self-righteous importance of someone at twenty who had yet to learn that adulthood threw just as many obstacles at you as adolescence. “We are absolutely _not_ having this conversation. The first sex talk we had was frankly bad enough. I don’t know _why_ you want a repeat experience!”

“Yet this conversation still needs to happen, Nydhalan,” Wynne’s steady voice replied, “...he seems quite taken with you.”

“You’ve only been here a few weeks,” Nyd responded dismissively, “he flirts with everyone like that. It’s really nothing special.”

“Only it is, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Nyd replied.

Zevran felt his shoulders tense - though none of the others knew this, that was the exact tone Nyd used when she was carefully, carefully trying to lie.

Wynne seemed to think the same thing. “This will not go well if you lie to me, Nydhalan.”

“...Then, are you referring to the fact that he _keeps_ flirting with me?” Nyd’s innocence, as she asked that question, was so well-crafted, that Zev wasn’t sure if even Wynne would notice. “That’s because he can’t get a reaction from me. He likes a challenge. It’ll make him feel all manly, if I capitulate. Don’t worry, Wynne, I’m not a child. It’s not going to turn my head - I know it’s nothing more than sport to him.”

Zevran frowned. Nyd was still lying - using half-truths, it seemed, to skirt a topic she didn’t want broached. But if she thought this deflection was a plausible cover story that masked her falsehood… then… did she really think that version of events _believable_? Did she really think so little of him?

He flirted, it was true, because it was fun. He teased her, too, because it was fun. And he _did_ like the challenge - one laugh from her was worth ten from anyone else. But he didn’t protect her in battle or smile at her monologues or laugh at her jokes because he thought it would aid in a _conquest_.

He was not one of those men who collected partners as trophies (there were so many, that would’ve gotten boring years ago). And he also saw no reason to keep doggedly pursuing someone who found him abhorrent. He _liked_ her. And though she acted indifferent to his flirting, she was now warm and friendly to him in every other respect. She was kind to him in a way that told him he was far from simply a sharpened blade or window dressing - nay, an _asset_ \- in her own mind.

“What if it was more than sport? What if the connection between you goes deeper than that?” Wynne asked, echoing his own thoughts.

“Wynne, honestly,” Nyd said - again, her voice ever so slightly false, in a way Zev was convinced no one else would notice. “What would ever make me think he thought of me in a _serious_ way? I know who I am. I know what I look like. I know what _he_ looks like. If you’re here to warn me not to put hormones above duty, or not to go starry-eyed over the first man to show any passing interest in me, who also happens to be very attractive, then I’m already right there with you and this entire painful conversation is needless.”

“...Do you truly not know?” Wynne asked, her voice betraying a hint of uncertainty.

“Not know, what? Wynne?” Nyd retorted, “that I’m ugly? That I’m plain? That I’m fat? Please, the list is rather endless, you must be more specific.”

She was lying, Zevran told himself.

But she’d picked something she might genuinely think was true.

“Why didn’t you want me to know his name, Nydhalan? When I first met him?”

“...Because I know you know about all of the trashy romances I’ve read set in Antiva?”

“Try again.”

“Fine!” Nyd said, with a heavy sigh, like she was giving up. “Because I knew you’d hate him! It’s stupid but - Leliana and Alistair are both _nice_. Zevran is not. I _knew_ what you’d think, as soon as I introduced him. That I was some silly girl who’d picked up the first romance hero I could find as soon as I wasn’t being forced to live like a Chantry mother anymore. I was trying to stave off this stupid conversation for a point where we weren’t being chased by abominations. You want me to be sensible all the time, and I am aware that hiring the person who tried to kill you is far from sensible. But he’s a good ally, and I don’t want you cheapening that by thinking it has anything to do with anyone’s beneath-underwear feelings. His or mine.”

There was a pause, in which he could hear Nydhalan’s heaving breath, from her furious rant.

“...Good,” Wynne said quietly, almost to herself, before saying louder. “Good. You are a Grey Warden now: duty comes first. You have responsibilities. I would hate to see you neglect them.”

“ _How_ is that different from being a mage, exactly?” Nydhalan said, her voice bitter. “Don’t worry Wynne, you drilled the art of being a heartless bitch who never thinks of her own wellbeing or happiness into me, from a very young age.”

“Oh, Nydhalan-”

“I’m going. This talk is over.” Zevran listened to her stomping footsteps as she trudged away. The other mage let out a long sigh, before walking in the other direction. He lay in the darkness, eyes wide open, unable to sleep.

_Nydhalan was still lying_

It had all been cleverly done. The self deprecation, followed by the unearthing of an old, lingering resentment to bring the conversation to an abrupt and justified halt. But his Warden had been lying, the whole time.

So what, then, was Nydhalan trying to hide from her guardian? Specifically, about him?

Zevran hoped this casket of ashes would be worth the endless, boring rounds of soul-sharing this Guardian wanted from them. It was so dull, sharing one’s inner secrets, and he couldn’t help but feel shortchanged by both this and the Fade puzzle combined. Everyone ended up hearing or seeing his darkest moments, and the blackmail he received in return was frankly paltry. Perhaps everyone here was just too… noble. At least with the demon’s multi-stranded puzzle, he had got to see Nydhalan kill many, many things wonderfully, in her many different forms.

This was just… riddles. And pressure plates. And far too many personal questions.

“Goodness,” Nyd sounded enthralled. “An actual, oral history of Andraste’s time on this plane! If we sold rights to this place, it could be worth a fortune!”

“ _Nydhalan,_ ” Wynne said.

“What?! I know it’s nice to have some kind of oral record, but it’s not like it contradicts any of the doctrine, so it would be thoroughly boring as a historical source,” she said. “Plus, we have no actual way of knowing if this is what they said or if this is just what the illusionist who made the constructs wanted them to say. Still, pretty cool. Very… Andrastian. Wasn’t very good at riddles though, was he? Whoever made this. Good at magic, terrible at wordsmithery. They weren’t very hard.”

Morrigan covered a snicker with her hand.

“Can you please show a little respect?” Leliana hissed.

“Oh, yes. I suppose. Got to be worthy, and all that,” Nyd said with a shrug, as they continued forward through the opened door.

Suddenly, she froze.

Zevran glanced hastily round the room, hands at his knife hilts, but the chamber was empty. Still, Nyd’s eyes were riveted on something. She looked up, and breathed, “...Jowan?”

...Jowan? Zevran had met the boy, in the dungeons of Redcliffe - a year younger than Nydhalan, with a voice that trembled like a leaf. Not quite how one pictured a blood mage, but it seemed that looks could be deceiving: he’d proven to be one all the same. Nydhalan had not had it in her to kill the snivelling wreck - really, at this point, Zevran was starting to doubt Loghain’s hiring procedures, given that he was recruiting so many ineffectual men, himself included - but she had also not dared defend his action. He now rotted away in Redcliffe’s dungeons, and would likely be executed by another’s hand.

'Murder by proxy.' That was how Nydhalan had termed it, when they first met.

A moment later, Nyd shook her head. “No, you’re not Jowan. You can’t be.”

“Um... what’s going on?” Alistair said from the side.

Nyd jumped, wheeling on him, “you can’t see him?”

“Um… nooo…..”

“It must be some kind of test.” Leliana said, “ a test, just for you.”

They all watched as Nyd frowned, and turned back to the empty space. She continued conversing with the air. After a stretch of time had passed, she said, “how can you know that? I’m a coward. I always was. I didn’t even save you in Redcliffe. I hate the Circle as much as you, but they still raised me. I think what you’ve done is wrong. And I don’t know if it’s because it is, or if they've just blinkered my vision too far.”

She paused for a response. Zevran wondered, idly, why this particular soul-bearing talk didn’t need to have witnesses. He would love to hear what Jowan was saying.

Then, as if he’d voiced that thought out loud, Nyd glanced over at Zevran, startled. She hastily turned away as soon as their gazes snagged. He wondered what her hallucination had said about him.

“I understand.” she said solemnly - which wasn’t at all ominous, no sir, not to Zevran. She held out her hands, and jumped, as if something dropped into them. When she opened her fingers to reveal a pendant in her grasp. “I’m really am sorry, Jowan.”

Everyone was glad to leave that creepy ghost town, even if it did feel vaguely sacrilegious to be carrying a holy relic in the same bag as the cooking utensils. Leliana insisted on carrying it. But no one had particularly enjoyed lugging that pack around, so it was handed to her quickly and without complaint.

“Back to Redcliffe we go!” Nydhalan said with a heavy sigh. “...Do we have enough money for horses yet?”

“Perhaps if we’d pillaged that temple…” Zevran started.

“Absolutely not!” Leliana said, hugging the bag protectively to her chest.

It was several days’ travel, and the sky overhead was grim and unwelcoming. They were all tired and miserable, but at least the Arl’s resurrection at Redcliffe (if some old dust sprinkled in his porridge, or whatever they had planned, even worked) might guarantee them a few nights in luxury. Zevran tried to keep this in mind on their second day of walking, as the sky gradually darkened and darkened until it was almost the colour of a bruise. Thunder rumbled off in the distance. When they stopped to camp for the night, they had barely ten minutes before the heavens opened - and Zevran hadn’t even started putting up his tent.

Everyone else dived into their hastily erected structures, as soon as the first droplets fell. Unfortunately, Zevran never really bothered packing his tent up in any particular order, and quickly struggled to find the main pole. The puddle of loose canvas started forming actual puddles. It wasn’t just rain passing overhead - this was a brewing storm. His bedroll began to get wet as he started rummaging around in the bottom of his pack, rain soaking through the outer layers of his clothes.

“Maker’s breath, this is fucking painful to watch!” Came a shout from over his shoulder. He turned to see Nyd already within the sanctuary of her own tent, holding the flap open, gesturing wildly. “Get in! I’ll dry it all after the storm passes! Just… just get in!”

Not one to ever turn down a lady’s invitation - and frankly not quite believing his luck - Zevran abruptly picked up his bedroll (feeling nothing if not ambitious), and sprinted forward, leaving the rest of his tent behind him. She let out an indignant squeal when he dived, soaked to the bone, into her tent, brushing his sodden form (deliberately) up against her shoulder.

“Maker!” she groused, shoving him to the far side as his hair dripped rain all over her tangled bedroll. At the other end of the tent, Cathaire watched the two of them, his tongue out as he panted. “We’ve been doing this for… how long now? And you still don’t put your tent up, first thing? What were you even doing?”

“Forgive me for forgetting, momentarily, that we currently reside in Ferelden, with the climate equivalent of a wet, soiled dishcloth,” Zevran grumpled, not willing to admit he’d been absorbed in the nightly routine of polishing his blades. Even he would admit that such a confession would result in some remark regarding impracticality, or perhaps ‘overcompensation’.

Outside the tent, the deluge trebled, as if in response to his complaint, the rain coming down in thick sheets. They watched as his abandoned pack - which, luckily, held nothing of value except his tent - quickly became waterlogged. The sound against the canvas was cacophonous, he could barely hear himself think. He shivered. “What I wouldn’t give to be camping in Antiva, rather than this frigid wasteland.”

“But I thought it rained a lot in Antiva, as well?” Nyd asked, confused.

“It does, but at least the rain is warm. Why, does it say that in your books?”

“...Maybe,” she looked down at her hands.

“I bet there’s a lot of scenes with heroes getting caught in compromising positions in monsoons, sheltering together in remote locations... all that clothing getting stuck to their damp, bare skin…” Zevran looked down at his own chest, hoping her eyes would follow suit.

“Oh please,” she scoffed, seeing exactly what trick he was trying to pull. “I know for a fact your leathers are waterproof because I fucking enchanted them, and this entire tent currently smells like wet dog.”

“As does most of Ferelden, to be fair.”

“Hey! Rude! I’m just saying: I’m pretty certain that this type of rain,” she gestured outwards, putting her hand under the spill for a second and shuddering at the chill, “has never been used to inspire romance.”

“Luckily, I’ve found that romance rather depends on the company.”

Zevran was rather proud of that line, but he should’ve known it would mean nothing to a heathen like Nyd Surana. She snorted unceremoniously, shaking her head, “oooh, look at you, smooth talker. Now stop dripping on my fucking maps.”

Zevran paused for a second, to move the maps from where they’d been crumpled under his knee, before observing, “you keep doing that, Nydhalan.”

“Doing what?”

“Deflecting my advances.”

“Oh, do I?” she said with an amused smile, rummaging in her pack until she found a ratty, threadbare towel. “I was completely unaware of that fact. Here -” she said, handing it over, “for your hair.”

Zevran looked down at the towel, and decided to take a chance. He asked, “won’t you dry it for me?”

“...You can’t be serious?”

“So you refuse?”

“Of course I refuse!”

“But it is not of consequence to me, Nydhalan, if my hair drips all over your sheets.”

“It will be, if I throw you out.”

Zevran pouted at her, enjoying himself immensely.

Nyd glared, pushing her glasses up her nose, “you’ll catch a cold.”

“Ah, dearest Warden, such gracious thoughts for my health and my well-being, and yet you will not do this one, small, insignificant thing for me…”

“Maker’s balls,” she muttered, and then, after a moment of indecision, shifted over. “Head down, you arse.”

Zevran was grinning as he bent his neck and she began towel drying his hair. It was glorious, even if she performed the task with the same vigour and perfunctory efficiency as if he were Cathaire fresh out of a bath. He heard her cursing and muttering above him, “an adult man, and he can’t even towel dry his own hair…”

“Why would I, when the alternative is so very enjoyable?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” she sighed. “So many people have fantasised about me drying their hair. Hundreds. _Thousands._ Elegies across the land, for Nyd Surana’s talented fingers and gentle touch.”

“Maybe I don’t want ‘gentle’.”

She froze for a second, before carrying on as before. “Well. I walked right into that one, I’ll admit. Now tell me again, about how you find racks sexy?”

She finished drying his hair. As she began to pull back, Zevran caught hold of her wrist. The grip wasn’t painful - not enough that she couldn’t have pulled away if she wanted to - but she froze in place, her expression having something of startled prey, that moment it saw it was caught in a trap. It was adorable, or at least would’ve been under certain circumstances, had the reaction been one they’d both wanted to trigger. But he didn’t want her to feel like that without her consent, so he was careful to loosen it a little bit more, showing how breakable his grasp was, should she choose.

She didn’t move away.

“You’re doing it again. Evading my words. You never let me finish,” he sighed, blinking up at her through his damp hair. “What are you afraid of?”

“...Regarding your advances, or you finishing?” she said, looking at his hand on her wrist warily. She was clearly feeling out of her depth, but she rallied, her voice continuing in its indifferent manner. “Nothing much, I suppose. I mean, you already tried to kill me, and that was catastrophically embarrassing for only one of us. What’s the worst that could happen here, really?”

In anyone else’s voice, that would’ve been a dare, a signal to move forward. But Zevran didn't rise to it, so worried he was about scaring her off and ruining what little progress he had made.

He felt extremely frustrated. It was rare that _he_ was the one who wanted to initiate a serious conversation and perhaps show some sincerity. But still she evaded him. Made her voice carefully obtuse, as if she was both knowing and oblivious to his motives at the same time.

He needed to show her that he wasn’t playing in the way she clearly thought he was. Zevran ran a thumb down her inner wrist, and was pleased when she visibly fought a shiver. Then, he suddenly doubted himself and worried it was for the wrong reasons, as he realised he’d brushed over her burn scar.

“I hope, at this point, you do not fear for your life,” he said, keeping his tone light and conversational, in the hope that he could get to the heart of the issue without her even realising they were there. “There were so many points I could’ve ended it, in all our months together. I hope I have proven, at least, that I am quite dedicated to keeping the breath in your body.”

“Yes, Zevran,” she said calmly. “I definitely consider you an ally.”

“Then, what is the reason? You know now, at least, that the way I speak with you, the way I am around you, is not merely a ruse to guarantee a knife under your ribs before morning breaks.”

“Blimey, what an image. No, I’m not afraid of anything from you. I suppose I’m... just not interested.”

The rejection would’ve stung but… her voice was different. Zevran watched with a hawk eyed gaze as she twitched, pushed her glasses up her nose, and avoided his eyes.

She was lying. He was sure of it. He knew her well enough now. It was the tone of voice she’d used when she told Irving she’d come back to the Circle once this was all over. It was the tone of voice she used around Leliana, when her friend waxed lyrical about her vision quest and the Maker’s guiding hand. It was the tone of voice she’d used with Wynne, when trying to avoid their confrontation.

He raised an eyebrow at her, unimpressed with the falsehood, which served nobody’s happiness and in fact actively disadvantaged them both. He stroked his thumb, again, against her pulse point, and this time she jolted and hastily disentangled herself, shoving both her hands in her lap like she was scared of what to do with them.

He leaned in to murmur in her ear. “On the contrary, Nydhalan. I think - I hope - you could be interested, if you ever dared let yourself.”

No one read that many romance books if they didn’t want, in a small part of their heart, to be romanced. He knew it was not possible for some, even when they chased or revelled in the fantasy, but he wouldn’t know whether that was true of Nydhalan until she told him. And, both selfishly and selflessly, it was something he wanted to make possible for her, if it was at all in his meagre power to make it a reality.

“I could help you become interested?” he whispered, hoping he didn’t sound quite as desperate for this to work as he actually was. “Give you the sales pitch? A free trial, if you will?”

The rain drummed on canvas, drowning out his words for anyone but her. Her tent was facing his, but everyone else’s doors were either closed, or facing away from their spot. If she took him up on his offer...

“Maker’s Balls, Zevran, please tell me you didn’t pretend to be incompetent at camping just to initiate this… this... _this!_ ” Nyd said, coming to a similar conclusion. Zevran was pleased to note her voice was a little breathless.

“Not at all, dear Warden!” his small victory meant that he could lean back again, giving her a warm smile despite the gulf of space between them. “The invitation was your own devising. I just happen to be the type to take advantage of all opportunities presented to me.”

“So that’s what this is, then, is it? An exercise, to see if you could? A whim? A diversion to pass the time while the storm runs its course?”

“Is that what you fear, then?” Zevran was actually pleased she’d said it - finally they could make some progress! “My lack of sincerity? Nydhalan, I’ve been pursuing you for _weeks_. If this was a mere game to me,” he asked, leaning in and touching a lock of her hair, “would I not have given up by now? Would I not have moved onto easier prey - say… Shale, perhaps? If this was only about my enjoyment - and it is, to some extent, for I think we could do some very enjoyable things together - then I don’t think I’d have this kind of staying power. I know you are too distinguished to have experience in this area, but it’s not at all fun to humiliate yourself daily pursuing someone.”

“Then... just... stop. Stop messing me around!”

“This is what I am trying to say, Nydhalan,” he said, exasperatedly, wrapping an errant curl around his finger while she blinked at him. “I am not doing this for sport. I am doing this for fun, yes, but are not all affairs done for that purpose? A thing can be diverting - that does not make it meaningless. I think we get on well. I like you. You are impressive and beguiling. I do not want to stop. Maker preserve me, but I cannot leave you alone.”

That final sentence... seemed to have some effect on her. She looked for a second… almost guilty. Then Zevran blinked, and she was back to her normal, unimpressed veneer.

“I’m not going to kick you out in the rain,” she said, suddenly, her tone hard. “But I think we should just stop talking. Please.”

“You still do not believe me,” Zevran sighed. He dropped his hand and moved back, raking his hands through his own hair and then looking over at her with a pleading gaze. “ _Please._ Tell me what I can do to make you believe me. Because, frankly, at this point, I am at a loss.”

She looked over at him, and their gazes locked. He was sure he looked like some pathetic beggar. And - though he was an expert of seduction - he found himself frozen, completely unable to move, when by some divine stroke of luck she did not choose to look away.

Something in the air shifted. It was a shift Zevran had been trained to recognise. The type he’d been taught to take advantage of. He didn’t know if he dared to, but he was too selfish, too weak - and ultimately, too much a Crow - to not take up the chance that was offered.

He leaned in, again, slowly. He kept his eyes on hers the whole time. His hand was careful and gentle as he reached out and tucked the same strand of her errant hair - there was always one, somewhere around her face - behind her ear. She jumped woodenly, jolting a fraction like she was fighting the reaction. As if someone had spilt pink paint across a canvas, a telltale flush began to leak across her skin. Zevran marvelled at it. He’d barely even touched her.

He let his hand settle against the side of her face, thumb stroking a broad stripe along her cheek. He heard her take a big breath. Behind her glasses, her eyes glanced sideways at his fingers, like she wasn’t quite sure it was really there, then back at him, eyes wide.

He leaned forward even more. She didn’t back away - he wasn’t sure she could. The breaths they took were now shared. He could kiss her. He could. If she just let herself go. If she just -

“Please, don’t.” Nydhalan gasped, scrunching up her adorable, broad cheeked face almost as if in pain. The pleading tone in her voice made him stop immediately, leaning back and away from her. His hand dropped. He was not the kind of man to force himself on any unwilling person.

But… she didn’t seem unwilling. The flush crawling over her skin, the ragged quality to her breathing, all spoke of arousal. “Don’t you… want to?” he whispered brokenly. It was bad form, but his own desperation meant he was unable to hold the words back.

“No?” the word came out like a question, and then Nyd shuddered, and her voice became cold and sure. “No.”

Zevran wondered if she was… if she was scared. She never talked about past lovers, only the relationships she read about in books, and he’d been honest about his own experience. He tried one last time: “I know what it is you think of me, Nydhalan, but I just want to kiss you. I do not expect anything more than this."

“Zevran,” she begged, but it was the wrong type of begging, and so he backed up, to the far side of the tent, and they sat in silence until the rain stopped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An almost kiss? Communication of feelings? When the wordcount isn't in hundreds of thousands? Clearly I must be under the weather.
> 
> Hope everyone enjoyed this! I'll see you next week :)


	5. Chapter Five

So, not Zevran’s finest moment.

He had to admit, his pride was hurt. Very rarely had a seduction failed - not since he was in his late teens and still subject to the occasional bout of nerves and hormones. It was quite the novel feeling. Even when he’d been felled in the dirt, spasming with electrical discharge and waiting for his life to end, he hadn’t resented his defeat in Nydhalan’s hands. But her rejection… it stung and humiliated him in a way that he wasn’t used to.

Not that he would ever let her know this, of course. He acted, outwardly, like nothing had changed, although he certainly curtailed the innuendo at every moment he remembered to think to do so. Without consent, something about the whole thing felt… off. Although his attraction did not abate in the least, and his dreams now had the added detail of that bright, rose flush, in all of the figure’s most secret places.

But what he had said that day in the tent was true: he could not seem to give her up. Romance was off the cards - at least for now - so he seeked intimacy in their friendship instead, once he’d given her a few days to recover from his one aggressive move and she seemed to trust being around him again. On the road to Orzammar, he told her about Rinna. His biggest mistake, his biggest betrayal, the moment when the glamorous life of the Crows had begun to truly sour in his mouth. He wanted to show her… to show her that he never did these things lightly. That he now thought through his actions carefully. That he trusted her with his deepest, darkest secrets, and dearest regrets.

He had no way of knowing, really, if she understood what it meant, for him to tell her.

And in Orzammar, when she descended into the Deep Roads, she left him behind.

Her face was grim and determined when she descended into the underdark, and she didn’t look back. Not once.

Zevran was not one for poetic metaphors about his feelings - unless the person he was trying to woo was into them, and then he would’ve recited passages from memory for days. But being separated from Nydhalan… hurt him. He felt her absence like a hollow in his chest. He’d gotten so used to her near constant monologues that those days spent in Bhelen’s grand mansion with Morrigan and Sten (not the chattiest of people, at the best of times) felt achingly, painfully, abrasively silent. His world was less joyful. He drank in taverns, but he didn’t take up any of the offers of flesh that were presented to him, both for money, and for free.

He fretted about when, and if, she would come back.

It was an unprecedented feeling. He knew he had liked her more than a passing flirtation, but these kinds of melancholic musings heralded something far more serious than even he’d understood himself capable of.

It was all a little embarrassing, really. The one person, of many, that he seemed to have properly fallen in love with, and he hadn’t even kissed her yet! He imagined Isabela’s reaction. Taliesin’s. It was, frankly, absurd. He decided to enjoy the novelty of the feeling while it lasted, rather than stew in the depressing futility of his situation.

Then, three weeks after Nydhalan’s departure, he woke in the deep of night (not much different than day, here deep underground), clutching his chest, screaming.

The agony was bone wrenching, a monster trying to prise itself free of his body but taking most of his body with it. It felt simultaneously like something was clawing at his chest, scraping and hollowing out the space between his ribs, and like a heavy weight was pressing down across it, snapping the bones to splinters. In the dark, he pulled his daggers from their sheaths on his thigh and reached out to slash at what he assumed to be his assailant, but there was no one sitting on him or straddling him on the bed. No source for this sensation. The pain rocketed higher and higher until it was unbearable. He had been hurt, a lot, and yet he could not comprehend the brutality of what he felt now.

He kept screaming.

“Goodness, what is this racket?” Morrigan cried, slamming into the room still fully clothed. Sten, in just his loincloth, followed closely after, his newly-returned sword drawn and nearly as tall as Zevran himself.

“I- I think I must be poisoned,” Zevran gasped, breathless, “I - I can’t-”

“Nyd and the Chantry sister will have my head if you die on us,” Morrigan said, sounding at the most mildly inconvenienced. She rushed forward, putting both hands on his bare shoulders in a way that would’ve once moved him immensely. As it was, it just made him shriek harder, a sound he had not made since he was very, very young, and not far into his training at his tutors’ hands.

The mage frowned, brow furrowing as her nails dug in to stop him trashing, “I do not detect poison, though I suppose healing is not my forte. There is… something here.”

She narrowed her eyes, her stare going off into the middle distance as if snagging on something. “Oh, my goodness,” she breathed, breaking away from him and stumbling back.

As quickly as the pain had started, it very abruptly stopped. Life, for want of a better word, slammed back into him, similar to when he was coming back to consciousness after being healed. Zevran no longer wanted to crawl out of his skin and discard this body behind him as he went. He was breathing raggedly, sweat drenching the sheets around him. “I - I - what did you do?” he demanded, checking his body for wounds and finding none.

“I didn’t do anything,” Morrigan said. Her voice sounded shaken, at least for her.

“The pain - it’s gone!”

“Is it? Give me your hands,” she demanded, and Zevran immediately complied with the urgency in her voice. She closed her eyes then let out a heavy sigh a few seconds later, relief that he was pretty sure had very little to do with his actual wellbeing causing her to slump. “Thank the Maker - it’s not because... The danger, it seems, has passed.”

He noticed that she surreptitiously glanced down at his wrist, as she replaced his hands, noting the burn scar. She was not quite as subtle as Nyd had been.

“What _was_ that?” he asked, sitting up in his bed. “I’ve - the pain, I’ve never felt anything like it. I do not scream often for reasons other than pleasure these days, you know.”

Morrigan stared at him, for a few seconds. Not because of his weak attempt at innuendo, in a shaky voice hoarse from screaming. But because she was seemed to be at a loss for what to do. She was very young, was Morrigan, though she tried not to show it - younger even than Nydhalan, and clearly not used to making decisions without her friend or her infamous mother there. “I…” she looked uncertainly at him, “err. Do you know… who your… well. Do you know whose name was written on your wrist, before t’was erased?”

He looked down, and examined it, “no. It was done when I was young, far too young to remember.”

“Well, then,” Morrigan seemed to look even more uncomfortable at this revelation - but then, it seemed that any personal conversation almost brought her out in hives. “Sh- that person, the person at the other end of your tether… _whoever_ they may be… was just… hurt. Badly. They were on the brink of death - or rather, the wrong side of it.”

“I… I felt them die?” Zevran whispered, his heart clenching in a way that made him feel almost angry. All that instinctual worry, for a person he didn’t know, when Nydhalan, the woman he did love, was risking her life in the Deep Roads. He didn’t have enough sympathy to spare for a stranger.

“Your connection is still there now, which means… which means they yet live,” Morrigan let out another huff of breath.

“If they’d… not?”

“I... imagine it would be like grief,” the mage told him, “razor sharp in the beginning, dulling to an ache, before fading from existence as if ‘twas never there.”

“And this just... happens? People who’ve never even met their soulmates or know their names, screaming out in pain at random intervals in their lives because they happened to be shackled by chance to some other individual with a poor sense of self-preservation?” Zevran sounded incredulous, and a little indignant, “I’m a _Crow_! Surely normal people can’t take that amount of pain without their… their hearts failing! Or something!”

“I.... well.” Morrigan looked awkward again, “let’s just say… it doesn’t happen that way for everyone. You clearly just… oh Maker. I really don’t know how to word this.”

“I’m… extremely unlucky?”

“Yes,” Morrigan sighed, putting her hand to her forehead, “let’s just go… go with that.”

When Nydhalan and her party finally clawed their way out of the Deep Roads, they looked like shit. Or, rather, like they’d rolled in it.

Wynne, Alistair, Leliana, and the drunkard who’d replaced Zevran all look like they’d tussled with a mountain of rotting flesh, and lost. Even Shale - outwardly unaffected - was withdrawn and taciturn. She didn’t even want to stamp on any of the nugs that littered Orzammar’s Commons.

Nyd herself looked unspeakably tired. One of the lenses of her glasses had a spiderweb crack running through it. She walked in an outfit that had once been purple - now it was brown and stiff with crusted, days old blood. She smelt like refuse, dried chunks of darkspawn sticking to the hem of her shift. When they greeted the group, Zevran couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose.

“I will… be burning these clothes,” she informed him after one look at his expression, herself fighting a shudder.

“So, Branka’s a fucking bitch,” she informed Bhelen tiredly, after she dirtied the assembly floor. “Fuck her, honestly. And I don’t know who the motherfucking hell should rule, I’m not a fucking dwarf. Just fight each other, and I’ll use the fucking treaty against whomever the fuck prevails.”

Zevran wished she had given him the time to point out that… well… they’d been living in Bhelen Aeducan’s very, very nice mansion house for over a month, on the assumption she’d keep up her side of the bargain. It was lucky he nearly always kept all of his possessions on him. Even after Bhelen defeated Harrowmont and the treaties were invoked, they got kicked out almost immediately. They purchased rooms in the tavern for the night, so those who’d weathered the Deep Roads could finally wash.

When Nydhalan came down to the bar for their evening meal, her hair was damp and her skin had been rubbed so raw she looked almost sunburnt. She sat down tiredly, and proceeded to demolish three plates of food without seemingly pausing to breathe. When Alistair opened his mouth to speak to her, she raised a single finger to silence him and said abruptly, “do _not_. I am trying very much not to think about darkspawn so I can finally finish a fucking meal without being sick. Now that I do not smell like… like...”

She pushed the half-full plate away.

“My friends, we should celebrate!” Zevran said into the following silence, clapping Alistair on the back, “we have all our treaties in one basket, yes? How about drinks, on me?”

“With… what money?” Alistair said, dubiously. “Unless you’ve been taking out contracts and assassinating dwarves the entire time we’ve been gone?”

“The money I put him in charge of when we left,” Nyd replied with a sigh.

“Don’t pout so, Warden! I have made for an excellent treasurer,” he smiled. “I stole nearly everything I could have wanted to buy with your coin.”

“Unfortunately, I’ll have to pass - both on the alcohol, and the not-pouting,” she said, standing up. “I’m too tired not to pass up as much time as possible getting acquainted with a real bed.”

Zevran reached his hand out to stop her progress. “Please, Nydhalan, stay. I promise I’ll buy you a bottle of the finest wine this place has to offer.” He’d been a little intrigued to see what a tipsy Nydhalan was like - not for any nefarious or underhand purposes, of course, but just because she always seemed a little uptight and closed off.

“I would love to - genuinely, I would,” she said, when she saw his face fall. “But this medicine Wynne’s got me on is fucking foul, and I’ve been told not to mix it with alcohol.”

“Medicine?” Zevran tried to sound unconcerned, and was pretty certain he failed. “What medicine? What for?”

“I.... got hurt, in the Deep Roads,” she admitted, as several people at the table fidgeted uncomfortably. “I’m fine now, obviously - Wynne healed me. But I need to take some kind of awful elfroot thing for the next week to stop the… wound from getting infected again.”

“What wound? Is it bad?”

“Um, well, a bite mark, technically,” she said, scratching a hand through her hair. “It’s not bad, now, I guess? Just itchy?”

Wynne looked at where Zevran’s hand was hovering over Nyd’s on the table. “I _did_ prescribe rest, Nydhalan.”

“And I’m absolutely taking it,” Nyd said, standing up quickly. “Look at me. Going.”

Zevran did not bother hiding his disappointment as the rest of the party began to call in drinks, taking him at his word. As the others fell deep into their cups without reservation, he sipped his wine the way a Crow often did, when they wanted to appear drunk but not to actually be so. Instead, he watched the stairs that Nydhalan had disappeared up, wishing he could speak to her.

How had she gotten hurt? She rarely found herself in the line of fire in battles, staying far back in the rearguard. He never let them get through to her. He wondered if the drunk dwarf had been responsible for her risking even the chance of injury, but then - if Shale had been there as well...

Without really consciously doing it, he stood up and made his way to go find her. He felt the eyes of the party follow him as he left, no doubt thinking the worst of his motives.

They’d taken three rooms for themselves in the back of the tavern. Shale would be sleeping in the stables, but one couldn’t put Morrigan and Wynne or Morrigan and Leliana in the same room without Nyd as a buffer, so Morrigan and Nyd ended up sharing together. He knocked on their door.

“Come in!” Nyd called. “It’s not locked!”

Zevran opened the door. He and Nyd looked at each other for a second, she went bug-eyed and horrified, and then he immediately spun around to face the empty hallway, closing the door hastily behind him. In the brief moment where he’d seen her, she’d been topless and wrestling with her clean nightshirt. The glimpse he’d gotten was of her soft rolls of brown, freckled skin, her breast band snug against her chest, and the-

He opened the door again, and Nyd squeaked indignantly, clasping the shirt she was still wrestling with to her chest with some semblance of modesty. “Zev!”

But Zevran’s hands were forceful yet business-like as he span her round again, to fully take in the sight of the large, angry and still yellowing bite along her back and shoulder blade. Dark bruising ringed teeth marks that were as wide as Zevran’s forearm, meaning the creature must’ve been huge. Chunks of her flesh were _missing_. The healing spells had sanded the damage down to shiny, age old scars, but the mottling of scar tissue indicated how deep the teeth had gone. The flesh was puffy and red, around the marks themselves.

“This was not a small wound!” he said to her. His voice was terse, he was angry despite himself. “I - you could’ve died from this! And it’s still infected! I thought you said Wynne was giving you medicine to stop you from being infected!”

Nyd was flustered, her cheeks and shoulders beginning to become patchy with red. “Would you please let go of me!?”

“Absolutely not! Do you have balm for this? I could get alcohol from downstairs, to sterilise it. How could you pretend you were ok?”

“I’m _fine_. I was bitten by an ogre, ok!” she said, wrenching herself free and then simply diving into the shirt as best she could, cursing when her head plunged out of the arm holes, before she finally got it on correctly. “An ogre with very, very bad dental hygiene. Who’d probably been eating blighted flesh for years. It’s not the first time I’ve been bitten by an ogre and, in this fucking quest against the King of Darkspawn, probably not the last! But I’m fine now and it’s not infected and… and who are you to just walk into a girl’s room while she’s changing!”

Zevran wanted to point out that it was something he’d done many times, but that wouldn’t explain why he’d still fled like a scandalised maiden at one glimpse of her own bare skin.

“I - you - you said I could come in!”

“I thought you were Wynne!”

“And you didn’t think to check? _How_ did I not manage to assassinate you?!”

“I don’t know,” she retorted, clearly flustered, “how did the Crows hire you, when you clearly can’t pick a lock to save your life?!”

“Th-there were no locked doors involved in any of my missions! Perhaps, when you finally let me rob a place, you’d see that -”

“Look,” she said, tiredly running both of her hands through her thick hair to force it clear of her collar, “we’re getting off track. I’m _completely fine_ , Zev. The bite hurt, but I got back up again. And next time, Maker preserve me, tell me it’s you, when you knock.”

She turned to move away, but he caught her hand as she lowered it from her shoulders. She stopped, looking warily at him, as she always did now, when touching was involved. He immediately dropped his hold, even though he couldn’t describe the warmth that coursed through the points where his skin met hers.

“Take me with you, next time, my Warden,” he pleaded in a low voice.

She blinked at him, and he continued, “this - it happened because I was not there. You’ve let me, poor assassin that I am, live, only to protect you. So. _Let me_. Protect you.”

“I… Zevran,” she sighed, looking up at him. Behind her spectacles, her eyes were unspeakably sad. “I’m sorry if you’re upset, but we’ve got to face that me d… getting hurt... is a thing that might just happen. There aren’t many ways this doesn’t end in death anyway, at the end of the day. You - you didn’t see the Deep Roads. They were fucking horrible. We’ve got no chance, against the army that dwells under the ground. You can’t protect me from everything, and you _know_ I would never ask that of you.”

“I pledged myself to you, Nydhalan. I _serve you_. Make use of me, when the time comes. Without regret.” He reached out again, to touch her cheek, but dropped his hand before he could get near, knowing it would only make her take his words less seriously.

“ _No,_ ” she said. He knew he must’ve looked wounded, and angry, at her words. She blanched at his expression, but repeated the same with more force. “No. I will not… I won’t _’use’_ you. I refuse. You’re not… not a tool, Zevran. You told me that yourself. The oath... you _know_ I only made you take it, in the beginning, because I thought you were going to murder us all in our sleep. Things have changed between us. I don’t hold you to it anymore. I don’t expect you to die for me, or protect me. And I don’t want you to. Please don’t feel like you're beholden to me... like... like I’m a burden you have to bear. My life isn't your responsibility. You’re free to do what you want.”

“I know _exactly_ what I want, Nydhalan,” he unthinkingly threw her words back at her, and was actually surprised when she winced. He hadn’t meant them harshly: it was merely a statement of fact.

He softened his voice carefully, willing her to understand. “There may not be many ways this doesn’t end in death, but I can promise you that, the ways in which you live? They _all_ involve me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news! This is probably the angstiest chapter of this fic (I think?) You've made it through! Onwards and upwards from here, theoretically.


	6. Chapter Six

“...Did you say Nyd _Surana_ ,” Dagna, the little dwarf girl they’d picked up Orzammar, squeaked. “I - I knew you were the Grey Warden, and I knew you were a mage, obviously, I _saw_ you at the Proving. But I didn’t realise… did you write the treatise on the conservation, harnessing, and transference of naturally tempestuous magics during thunderstorms?!”

Nyd pinked under the girl’s worshipful gaze, pushing her glasses up her nose, “I… yes. That was me. It was my first published paper, actually. How did you… I mean, doesn’t seem like something that would be particularly useful to read, in Orzammar.”

“I didn’t exactly get to be picky, I just bought whatever magic texts came through! But - but I _loved_ your paper!” Dagna said, “your writing was so easy to follow! I’d never seen a thunderstorm, obviously, but even I could understand your theories and your methodology.”

Zevran watched from the other side of the campfire, smiling as his Warden blushed under the girl’s praise. He thought the dwarf girl was a little bit of a liability, personally - why send her to the Circle Tower, when it stood in abomination-splattered ruins? - but it was clear to everyone why Nyd had agreed to escorting her. Aside from the fact that Dagna was also a scholar fascinated with arcane knowledge, she was a brand new - and readily willing, enthusiastic even - audience for Nydhalan’s lectures. She, if no one else, was more than happy to hear his Warden talk for hours.

“But… but you _shape-shifted_ during your Proving! That’s controversial magic! It’s not yet taught in Circles, how did you…?”

“My friend taught me. Morrigan…” Nyd gestured over to where the apostate sat, glowering at her own small campfire. She seemed to think through exactly what would happen if she let Dagna, with all her boundless enthusiasm, interrogate her companion, and seemingly thought better of saying anything more about it, “I... would you like to see it? I could demonstrate to you, if you like?”

When the girl immediately acquiesced, Nydhalan turned into a wolf and began to play with Cathaire while Dagna grinned and made notes, sketching in her journal. When Cathaire jumped happily at a wolf that was twice even his massive size and the wolf capitulated, lying on its back with its tail wagging, Zev grinned.

“Excuse me, Zevran?” came a dour voice to his left, and he looked up to see Wynne watching him watching Nydhalan. “Might I speak with you a second?”

“Of course, ma’am,” he said, and followed her out onto the edge of the darkening wood, mildly curious as to what misdemeanour she would upbraid him for this time. 

“I need to ask you a question, Zevran.”

“Yes, you are a very beautiful woman, Wynne, particularly for your age. But I fear you are a little too old for me,” he responded immediately, grinning at her in the dark. 

“Hilarious. Truly. For a woman who’s spent her entire life living with an ever-cycling cohort of teenagers under her feet, let me tell you that your brand of humour is thoroughly novel and amusing,” Wynne replied coolly. “No, what I need to ask you is this: what is your relationship with Nydhalan?”

“Is this where I must ask for her guardians’ permission to court her?” he asked, “because I was rather under the impression Nydhalan was a free woman, answering to no one but herself, these days.”

“So, there is something you must ask permission for? Is your bond romantic in nature? Or is it simply sexual?”

For a second, Zevran amused himself by imagining how much Nydhalan would react to such questioning. For him, it wasn’t an awkward or unpleasant thing. In fact, it was rather gratifying to hear that a spectator would think sex was involved, between the two of them. But he thought Nyd might have torn her own face off out of embarrassment, then and there. 

“My, my, Wynne, I don’t know what you mean,” he purred. “Warden Surana and I’s relationship is thoroughly professional. Even with all my efforts to the contrary. She’s a rather virtuous lady - one can’t even go near her without triggering a maidenly blush. I blame all those years of sexual repression in the Circle, leaving her with crippling guilt surrounding any form of desire. Tell me, is it really true that they even watch you bathe? Seems like a rather unhealthy and toxic arrangement to me, far more worrying than the honest attentions of one man whom you simply dislike-”

“Oh, my goodness me,” Wynne murmured, putting her hand to her forehead, “you think I don’t like you.”

The woman looked inexplicably mortified.

“...I’m pretty certain you _hate_ me, truth be told.”

“Oh, no, Zevran. You are a little… questionable in your morals, but you seem like a thoroughly well-meaning man. You could possibly do with a little less bravado - it gets quite grating at times. But you’re still so young, I’d hardly hold that against you. It’s just… I’m worried,” Wynne looked at him, “is what you’re telling me true? Nothing has happened between you and Nydhalan? No declarations? No words, no… _revelations_ have been shared?”

“Compared to my other conquests, everything has been rather tame.” Literally speaking, it was actually ‘everything has been completely fucking chaste’, but Zevran’s ego wouldn’t allow himself to make _that_ sort of admission, to Nyd’s self-appointed grandmother, no less.

“But… I’m confused,” Wynne shook her head. “I… Morrigan came to me and told me you were grievously wounded, when Nydhalan died in the Deep Roads. For you to feel such pain... I was worried you’d already sealed the bond without realising the consequences…”

“Nyd _died?!_ ” Zevran demanded. He thought back to her wounded shoulder and the way she’d hastily brushed off his concern. The way she told him she’d probably die one day, that death was an inevitable consequence of their quest and of being a Grey Warden, as if she’d had to come to terms with that fact and make her peace with it. “What do you mean Nyd died?!” 

And then the rest of the sentence caught up with him, and he froze, “I - what… what bond? What do you mean? _What are you talking about?_ ”

“Oh.” Wynne murmured. “Oh, dear.”

And then, she glanced down at his left wrist.

Why, Zevran would never know. It was not like she would be able to read anything that was there, in the dark. But it felt almost violating, like she knew something about it that he didn’t. He covered the burn mark instinctively with his other hand, almost as if ashamed, even though he’d never been ashamed of it before. And then he realised…

Realised what she thought she might see written there. What bond she spoke of, between him and Nydhalan. What she suspected. Or what she… knew?

“I… you cannot be serious,” he said, disbelieving. “She’s - I - how would you even know such a thing?”

He thought back to the crushing, harrowing pain that had assaulted him as they lived deep within the earth in Orzammar. Morrigan’s relief, when she found out the person at the other end yet lived… when Morrigan gave very few shits, about very, _very_ few people in this world.

How his first thought was of Nydhalan, weathering danger in the labyrinthine Deep Roads. How he’d not cared for a strangers’ life, but only thought of hers.

“Oh, Zevran.” Wynne murmured, her face a picture of horror and regret, “I - I thought you knew.”

“How the fuck would I know that?" he demanded. "How the fuck do _you_ know?” 

But… but Wynne had been the one to give Nydhalan her name. No doubt she’d been there, held the young elven foundling newly deposited within the Circle’s walls, perhaps even before the mark was erased.

“ _How could you not tell us?_ ” he said, furious now. “If you’d - you knew as soon as you met me! How dare you not tell me? And- and - how dare you keep it a secret from Nydhalan?! Why would you keep this from us? Her, at least. You’re meant to love her, t-” 

He stopped himself before he finished his sentence: _you’re meant to love her too._ The admission took on a whole new layer of terrible, fatalistic meaning, now that he was presented with what he somehow knew to be the truth.

Wynne’s eyes were sorrowful. “Oh Zevran, I’m so very sorry. I didn’t think you’d be finding out like this. I really wouldn’t have said anything, if things were not getting out of hand. But... she’s one of two remaining Grey Wardens in Ferelden, and if the bond is strong enough for you to feel her pain… there’s very few ways this ends well, for either of you. I could no longer bear to keep you in the dark about what the future may be”

“You should never have kept us in the dark in the first place! What about her? Why are you only telling me?” Zevran felt cold dread settle in his stomach, thinking of all the reasons there could be. “So - what? Are you going to tell me to stay away from her? To end things now, before they get worse? To keep this a secret from her, as well?”

“Oh Zevran.” Wynne sighed. She looked very, very old. “Please don’t misunderstand me. Nydhalan already knows.”

Zevran tore through the camp.

Nydhalan was no longer a wolf. A brief, assessing glance showed him that Dagna was now at the other end of camp quizzing Shale about what it was like to be a golem. Warden Surana - his Warden, he’d always thought of her as _his Warden_ \- was now deep into reading her latest book, squinting to read by the dim glow of the campfire. She looked up at his approach, clearly startled by his intense expression. She nervously pushed her glasses up her nose as he knew she would. His heart _hurt_ to look at her.

“I would like to speak with you. _Now_.”

“Zevran, what is-”

He grabbed her hand, pulling her up to standing. She let out a surprised noise of protest as her book tumbled into the grass, and he began to drag her away. “Hey!” Alistair said from the sidelines, “what are you-”

“Do not meddle, Alistair,” Morrigan interrupted, from somewhere else in the darkness, “tis a conversation that I believe may be long overdue.”

They strode out of camp - far out of camp, far further than where Wynne had taken him to break the news. Nyd stumbled blindly in the dark after him, clearly confused. “Zev, what’s wrong?” she asked, her voice worried, “why are you so angry? Your grip, it’s hurting me-”

At her first mention of discomfort, he immediately dropped his hold. A second later, he cursed himself for doing so. He’d always felt so powerless around her - was this the reason, then? Was this why?

He didn’t even know if it made him angry. Suddenly, everything about her, from the gift of Dalish gloves, to his desperate need to make her laugh, to her begrudging but ultimately avid love of his stories of Antiva, all made sense. Even their time in the Fade, when he’d been more than willing and somehow able to follow her anywhere. Wynne was also a mage - but when he’d seen Nyd’s mentor in the Fade she had not been limned with silver as Nydhalan was in his eye. That must have meant - that must’ve been a sign that -

“Wynne seems to think we may be soulmates,” he said abruptly. 

Her face shifted from momentary, abject horror, to becoming entirely shuttered a second later. A careful, expressionless mask. It told him all he needed to know.

_Oh Zevran. Nydhalan already knows._

But she’d never acted on it - and never let _him_ act on it either. That, Zevran realised, was what made him angry. She’d denied everything about them - and denied him everything about them as well.

The only thing that didn’t make sense… the only thing that had never made sense, when he seemed to need her as much as breathing, was _her_.

“How long have you known?” he demanded.

She looked away from his face, into the darkness at her feet.

“ _How long have you known?_ ”

She mumbled something, incoherent and small.

“Forgive me, Warden, but I really am going to need you to _speak up_.”

She flinched, and that made him flinch, like he’d dealt himself a physical blow. He’d always been good at turning an enemy’s force against them.

“A year.” Nydhalan said. Her voice sounded wretched.

_A year_. 

That had not been the answer he was expecting. In fact, it made everything a thousand times worse.

“But… but I…” Zevran’s heart was pounding in his chest, fury hot in his blood. “But I only met you nine months ago.”

Nydhalan closed her eyes, as if anticipating pain. “I know.”

“You. When you… you _met me_. In the clearing, where I swore myself to you. You...”

She nodded.

Zevran felt very far away from his body. It was that faraway place that torture often forced him too. He was on the rack again, and she was watching, but this time she didn’t do anything to stop it. He had no idea how this woman, this woman he’d never kissed, could make him hurt so very much. How she could make him retreat into that small, far off part of himself that he’d always sought refuge in, when others deliberately inflicted pain.

“Is that why you _saved me?_ ” he asked, brokenly.

She hesitated. Then nodded again. Her lip trembled. In fact, her entire body started quaking. He wondered if she was scared of him, or if she was just scared.

“But… you never _let me touch you_ ,” he whispered. How could she deny the both of them, knowing? How could she deny herself? How could she deny him, and lie to him with every breath?

Her voice quivered when she finally spoke. “I… I was trying to make it… make it better,” she said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “If we didn’t… if you stopped… the bond wouldn’t take. You’d be safe.”

“You think I have ever cared about _safe?_ ” He asked, with a savage, hysterical laugh. “Safe from what, exactly? Something that many people spend all their lifetimes searching for?”

“I…” her voice trailed off.

“Tell the truth, Nydhalan,” he said viciously. “You just never wanted _me_.”

“No! That’s not-”

“You _hated_ me, from the very beginning. You’ve only ever tolerated me. Some people wait all their lives for the bearers of their mark, but you found me and you didn’t want me and I-”

“Zevran, no!” she took a step towards him, and for the first time _he_ was the one to back away. “That’s not true. That’s not - that’s not what I was doing - please, let me speak.”

“Speak, then.” he demanded, angrily. “Explain. _Why would you keep this from me?_ ”

“I… I was trying to protect you.”

“From what? Loving you? Clearly, a terrible fate! One that gets worse with every passing second, I can tell you!”

He heard her sharp in-take of breath on the word ‘love’, because he was programmed by now to notice it. They both fell silent.

“Because… because don’t you see, Zevran?” she asked quietly, her voice small and sad, “it’s clearly… it’s clearly fake. A trap. Magical coercion. It’s - it’s clearly _not right_.”

_She doesn’t want me_ , Zevran thought, his heart breaking. But all he asked was, “Why would you say that?”

“Because… I… l-look at me!” she muttered. A hand came up and angrily swiped at her cheek, smashing her glasses at a sideways angle off her nose. Her voice grew louder as she started to cry, “ _look_ at me! And look at you! I-I’m just some mousy, idiotic little girl who spent her life trapped away growing fat and ugly, and you’re this glamorous, well-travelled and _beautiful_ assassin who could have anyone, _anyone_ he wants. We have _nothing_ in common - why would you even _want_ me? Why would you _ever_ want me? How can we be soulmates, when we’re so different? The bond must be mangled or wrong or it’s all a fucking lie, and it’s not f-fair on you to be trapped with some u-ugly girl who’s destined to die before her f-fortieth birthday. A-and b-both of us could’ve gone without knowing if I hadn’t looked in that Maker-c-cursed book!”

By the time she finished her speech she was shouting, and her unsteady, agonised voice echoed across the trees as they fell silent again. A few moments passed, and the only sound was her sniffling.

Zevran remembered what she’d said to Wynne before, about knowing there was no way that a man like him would ever show genuine interest in her. She’d believed those words, then. Even when...

“Let me get this straight,” Zevran said, his voice flat and disbelieving. “You knew we were bonded, from the very beginning. You found me, despite everything. Despite every obstacle that stood in your way, as a child of the Circle. I told you again and again that I was attracted to you, but you thought I was lying. I told you again, and you still didn’t believe me. All the while, you knew I was your _soulmate_. And yet it remains unthinkable that I could... What? Desire you? Love you? Unthinkable enough, that you think the whole system is broken?”

“You said so yourself, you didn’t understand the way you felt about me!” Nyd retorted, “you said you couldn’t leave me alone, _even if you wanted to_. Y-you said you never wanted to be tied to one person - why in all of Thedas would you want to be tied to _me?_ ”

Zevran closes his eyes, briefly. The cleverest woman in all of Thedas, and she was still _a complete fucking idiot_.

“I - I don’t want you to feel beholden to me,” Nyd continued, oblivious to his gradual revelation about her absolute idiocy. “All this time fate has just been s-steering you in a direction without your consent, and I t-thought it was ok so long as you didn’t get hurt, b-but now Wynne’s told me you did get hurt and I’m probably g-going to keep hurting you. S-so I can let you go, I promise I d-don’t expect you t-to change and r-really I d-don’t need you. E-everything will be fine if we just s-stop this now, if we just _stop_ -”

“I agree.” Zevran said, taking a step forward.

“You agree?” her voice was still trembling. She pushed her glasses up her nose again, leaving a greasy print all across one lens.

“You do very much need to stop talking.”

And he needed to stop being afraid, when Nydhalan Surana, the fearless and formidable Grey Warden, was clearly afraid enough for the both of them.

Zevran closed the distance, and kissed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full disclosure so people don't hate me TOO much, the next chapter is very plot-relevant flashback! Kissing will resume in two chapters time!


	7. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: internalised fatphobia

For the first sixteen years of her life, Nydhalan Surana found her soulmate scar comforting.

Whenever she felt foolish, or ugly, or fat, or - in her worst moments - insignificant and unbearably, inescapably _trapped_ , she would look down at her wrist and think, _there was a name they had to erase_. 

Maybe someone in the world looked down at their wrist every night, and thought of Nydhalan Surana. And it didn’t matter what they imagined, because they would never have to have their hopes dashed. 

_I mean something, to someone_.

In darker times, she thought, _this is one way, at least, I don’t have to suffer._ She didn’t have anyone to miss, the way the person on the other end of the tether might. She knew she didn’t have a hope of meeting him - she thought it was a him at the time, going by her own preferences - so she just took comfort in his existence. The person at the other end might be searching for her. They might spend their whole life disappointed, aching to be complete. And there was no way of them ever finding her. the Circle was never required to disclose the names of their members to people outside of the Fereldan government, and she really hoped her soulmate wasn’t a _politician_.

It was only around the time that she became friends with Anders, that the mark began to make her angry.

Anders was a student few years older than her. For a brief moment when she was fourteen, watching him assist Wynne teaching healing magic, she entertained the idea that, in the perfect world, he might be her soulmate, with his soft hands, kind eyes, and excellent cadence whenever he discussed magical theory. 

That was the other perk of not having a mark: you could slot anyone into the fantasy that occupied your brain, and let yourself will their name onto the blank space on your arm. 

Thankfully, it was two years later when she actually mustered the courage to talk to him. By then, the crush had long worn off. One of the stalwart effects of growing up amongst the same several hundred people was that you often didn’t entertain crushes on any of them for long. Or at least, you eventually caught them doing something stupid - like choking on a mouthful of porridge and then coughing it nearly five metres across the room, in Anders’ case - which quickly disillusioned any heady bouts of hero worship. The two of them quickly became friends, once they realised they could excel in separate fields and never be in direct competition with each other, for the fame and glory that was pretty much your only method of feeling in control, in the Circle. 

But then, they both started to become adults, which involved realising that certain aspects of their life, accepted without question when they were young, were… were _wrong_. Anders was angrier about it than Nyd. Nyd just dealt with it by burying herself deeper in books, ordering atlases and travel logs and, yes, romances set in Tevinter and Antiva and the Free Marches, into the library. While Nyd made herself smaller and smaller so the sharp edges of her cage couldn't hurt her, Anders started talking to other people. People she herself avoided, for fear their association would derail her Harrowing, and what she hoped would be her steeply upward trajectory within the Tower’s hierarchy. 

Nyd was an elven foundling from Jader. She wasn’t a nobleman’s child who’d developed an unfortunate magical ailment, whose family money could help her get away with a few brief entertainments of rebellion. She needed to keep her record pristine, if she wanted to excel. If she wanted to ever… leave.

Anders muttered to her one lunchtime, glancing over at another table in the mess hall. “They have a census. They _must_ do.”

Nydhalan glanced in the direction he was looking, and quickly looked away. Nish, a young, sullen-faced elf who currently supported bruises around her wrists and jaw, had been returned to the Circle that morning. She’d escaped a month ago by casting an illusion on herself and stowing away on the ship that brought their food deliveries. Rumour was already circling that, when she’d been found, she’d been dwelling in her soulmate’s cottage on the outskirts of Amaranthine. Nish was a _somniari_ , and she’d long found and communicated with her soulmate in dreams. 

“What are you talking about? What... census?”

“Of our soulmates. Why would they just erase them, and never use that information against us? They use everything else,” Anders said, looking angrily at his own blank wrist, and then the walls of around them. “They _must_ make a note of them all somewhere. And if we bolt, they track them down. Our soulmate is probably the first place they look.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Nyd replied, looking down at her food. She made the order multi-layered: now, just after someone had been brought back, was not the time to be making trouble. She wanted the entire conversation to just end. “The stupid girl didn’t even destroy her phylactery. _That’s_ how they found her. There’s no census.”

“I’m telling you - the First Enchanter of Montsimmard? Vivienne? They made her First Enchanter because they _knew_ her soulmate was the Duke Bastien de Ghislain, and that they could leverage that connection for their own benefit. It was pure nepotism.”

“Really, Anders, she could’ve just been very good at her job.”

She looked down at her own wrist, and that was the first time she felt a flash of resentment. Really, it would’ve been nice to have a name, even if it was meaningless and only there to taunt her. It was like she was a child who wasn’t trusted to hold a cookie jar. They didn’t get to keep this small, integral part of themselves, because the Templars were worried they couldn’t control mages who _wanted things_. That it would cause chaos. 

Nyd wasn’t an _animal_. She knew she could control herself. She just wanted to be trusted. 

But mages were never trusted, with anything.

If a census _did_ exist, then there was just a whole other layer of insult. The removal of soul marks was no longer a mere precaution. It became a weapon, turned inwards on a soft underbelly. An exposed stomach.

She glanced up from her wrist to see a blonde templar - the young kind, that always wanted to bag an early promotion by uncovering some deep-seated blood mage conspiracy - watching her from across the room. She hastily got out her latest romance book and opened it to a random page next to her food tray. She pretended to read, and tried not to think about censuses at all.

It was only when Nyd destroyed the final door into the restricted storeroom in the Circle’s basement, that she realised she wasn’t really doing this for Jowan, or that insipid girl he was insisting was his true love. She didn’t even _like_ Jowan, not really. It was more that he’d seemed too incompetent to be anything other than safe, and so she’d made friends with him. Which was really coming back to bite her on the arse now, wasn’t it?

But, no. This wasn’t for him. This was all for _her_.

All those years, being a good little mage, An exemplary student. A careful, cautious girl who extracted what adventure she could from stories and never set a toe out of line in her stone prison. And for _what?_

Her Harrowing had felt like a sick, cruel joke. It was just so… so _easy_. Instead of being besieged on all sides by demons - as she had been led to believe was the natural state of her cursed, Fade-ridden psyche - she’d only gotten one very obviously sinister individual, who pretended to be her ally while making needlessly ominous comments, like a badly written villain in a penny dreadful. And then it had basically nodded and smiled and _let her get on with her fucking day_ , when she’d politely declined the offer of possession. 

It hadn’t even been a desire demon. She couldn’t help but feel vaguely insulted by that. There were _so many things_ she wanted - she would’ve thought she was prime fucking meat for a desire demon. But apparently she was just as frumpy and sexless in the Fade as she was out of it.

Honestly… _this_ was what she’d been scared of? The demon proved itself more polite than half the fucking templars she spent her day-to-day life with. She was _furious_. She’d suffered through all this… this pale mockery of life, because she’d believed it was all necessary. But if that was all a Harrowing was, then _why?_

Quite frankly, it made sense for her to be breaking more rules now than she ever had in her life, twelve hours later.

As Jowan and Lily ran off to find his phylactery, Nyd began hungrily roaming the shelves, looking at all the forbidden things she’d denied herself for years. Drinking in the secrets they weren’t ever supposed to find. It started off harmless - she pocketed rings and necklaces, rummaged through the priceless artefacts, (took a very nice staff), thumbed through books written in elvhen script about the fall of Arlathan, and ancient Tevinter texts that no doubt said far too many good things about mage supremacy. 

She followed Jowan through to the phylactery chamber, wondering idly if she should destroy her own vial. Perhaps she could swap a few labels around and put her name on the blood of someone safe and unlikely to leave. Old and soon to die. Like Wynne. Then, when the woman did kick the bucket and they smashed up Nyd’s vial, thinking it was her guardian’s, _then_ Nydhalan would be able to go.

She trailed her eyes along the wall, wondering if she could wait until Jowan was gone from the room to carry out her much more effective version of his plan. When… she found it. A thick tome almost as long as her arm, wrapped in burgundy leather. There was a whole shelf of them, the leather getting darker and darker with age until the oldest were nearly black.

Books of all their soulmates. 

They… they _were_ used as the second means of tracking them. Anders - the smug git, he’d be beside himself with glee if he knew - was completely right. The absolute _bastard_. He knew the templars and the Chantry as well as he knew himself.

They were arranged by years of induction - or rather: years of burn-scars inflicted. Anders was the first name she found, in fact, as she picked up the second most recent tome, which listed the years of their arrival. She found him about halfway through, one year before her. In a second column, was another name - _Leto_. No second name. Nydhalan’s fourteen year old hopes were thoroughly dashed.

She flicked a few pages further through as Lily and Jowan searched through the shelves of glass. _Do I want to know?_ she thought. 

Of course she did. It wasn’t even a question.

She got to her year. She could feel her heart hammering, her pulse pounding through her hand as her fingertip scrolled through the names. Next to _Nydhalan Surana_ , was the name of her soulmate: _Zevran Arainai_.

 _Zevran Arainai_. She tangibly felt it as the name was burned into her mind, like a brand seared into deep flesh. A burn, to combat the one on her arm. She committed it to memory, and then she set fire to the book while Jowan and Lily yelped behind her, confused. But Anders was planning another escape sometime soon. She’d tell him about Leto, and maybe he’d be able to find them, and they’d be happy together and never get caught.

And she could… and she could…

 _Zevran Arainai_. That was an Antivan name. So... they were miles away, far outside her reach. They’d never, ever get to meet. But she finally _knew_. She knew their name.

Of course, it didn’t matter. Because roughly twenty minutes later, everything changed again. And suddenly, on the road to Ostagar, it no longer became a question of never meeting her soulmate, but of never living long enough to care.

Nyd ran her tongue along the inside of her cheek, feeling for any loose teeth and relieved when she found none. “That bitch _punched_ me!” she said to Alistair, looking down at the assassin. Cathaire had torn her throat out, and a massive pool of her blood was gradually sinking into the dirt, “she punched me, Alistair! She could’ve broken my glasses! What the actual fuck?!”

“Nyd… you do realise they were trying to _kill_ us.”

“I just… I am not the type of person to be punched,” she muttered indignantly. “A knife under the ribs? Fine. Darkspawn? I accept. I do _not_ want to be… be beaten into pulp like a thug in a back alley!”

“The rock has found one yet breathing,” Morrigan interrupted in her imperious voice. “Do you have questions?”

“I _always_ have questions,” Nyd replied, as she ambled over. “Most of them currently have to do with the questionable levels of classiness these assassins possess. Can they not afford weapons, or something? Why must we resort to punching, like barbarians? Do you know how long it takes to be punched to death?”

“Er… no?” said Alistair.

“Neither do I, but I imagine it's a terrible way to go.”

“I am often quite happy to resort to punching,” Shale offered conversationally, in her deep voice.

“Now Shale, please don’t stomp the nice assassin’s face until _after_ the interrogation…”

Nyd followed Morrigan over to where their new golem friend stood over a lithe figure who was crumpled unceremoniously in the dirt, muscles still jumping and spasming in infrequent bursts under his skin. Ah, so it was the leader who'd survived, then - the one who’d been immediately taken out by her Tempest. Nyd clucked over the painful, rictused arrangement of his limbs, feeling a little bad about it. This man, at least, hadn’t punched her. He’d just made a dramatic hand gesture, and then promptly fallen unconscious. As was polite, she felt. 

When he opened his eyes, she had to steel herself, because he was _very_ pretty. That had been her first thought upon seeing him, too, when they’d walked into the trap. Which she knew was very unprofessional, even if she was very new to this ‘Leader of the Fereldan Grey Wardens’ business. He wouldn’t have looked out of place on a romance cover, posed against a warm sunset. It was almost like the Maker had chosen to paint him in sepia, with this fate in mind. A bright, sunny fall of golden hair; warm, tawny skin; and dark, coppery eyes like the stain of saffron on skin after cooking. The swooping lines of his tattoos accentuated high, angular cheekbones, and the strong line of his jaw. Nyd had never really wanted tattoos on her face - they would’ve looked ridiculous with her glasses - but she had always appreciated the aesthetic. A lot of elven romance heroes had excellent tattoos, extending all over their body. Not entirely accurate, but it seemed there were lots of human writers in Orlais secretly hot under the collar for _vallaslin_.

And his voice. _Damn_. What was that accent? Rivaini? Antivan? Nevarran?

“Goodness, then this will prove to be an incredibly unproductive interrogation.” She said with a sigh, partly despairing at herself. Currently, she was only half listening to his answers. She trusted Leliana, at least, to remember them for her. Alistair probably wasn’t paying attention either. Morrigan and Shale _certainly_ weren’t.

“Let me save you some time: my name is Zevran, Zev to my friends.”

Nyd was shaken out of her daydream with all the ceremony of a bucket of ice water dumped over her head. _No_. 

“...Zevran?” 

_No_.

That just… wasn’t possible.

“Yes,” he said, grinning unabashedly at her, as if pleased to finally have caught her interest. “Zevran Arainai.”

 _Oh Maker’s Balls, are you fucking kidding me?_ No way. There was absolutely _no fucking way_...

Nyd didn’t know how she managed to make it through the conversation, except by her tried and tested method of extreme, lofty sarcasm - the stalwart defence mechanism of the snotty nerd who’d often been bullied. She knew that soulmates had the whole fate thing going, but this was ridiculous! How did Loghain manage to hire her soulmate to kill her, entirely by chance? 

Perhaps… did Loghain know that was her soulmate’s name, from reading the Fereldan Circle census? Had he just hired any hot Antivan with a rather pleasant body to play the role? ...No, that seemed like a rather romantic and ridiculously melodramatic plan for the grumpiest and sullenest man currently residing in Ferelden (bar, she supposed, Sten). Loghain had no way of knowing before she’d burnt the book that she’d become his enemy, and clearly no way of planning for this assassin… this, _Zevran_... to be dropped unconscious, not killed, and then to somehow infiltrate their group. Which meant - which meant -

No. It was _impossible_. 

_I mean, look at him!_

She wondered if he knew. He was certainly… looking at her, as if he knew. And he wasn’t a Circle mage, so… 

...What kind of creepy, twisted pervert took out a death contract on their soulmate, and _then actually tried to see it through??!_

Not her. Nyd found she couldn’t bring herself to sentence him to death. If he was her soulmate… She wasn’t a _sociopath_. Who would just sever that connection unthinkingly without an ounce of doubt? 

And well. Actually. Truth be told, she just found him extremely likeable. Compelling. That was probably the soulmate thing, she knew, but she didn’t tend to just kill people she liked if she could avoid it. Ignoring another desperate attempt flirtation - if he knew she was his soulmate, _why the fuck was he trying so hard?_ Did he not find it painfully awkward? - she reached out with her left hand and tugged him up to standing. As she did so, she made sure her grip was tight enough but the force behind it loose enough to angle his wrist for a second while his body stayed sat.

No name. Just a burn mark. A familiar burn mark. 

_Oh, Maker’s fucking tits._ He _didn’t_ know. Or maybe he did. She didn’t know when he’d gotten that burn. Although, she thought with a leaden stomach, it looked so very similar, in age, to her own.

“I hereby pledge my oath of loyalty to you, lovely Nydhalan,” he said, his voice like smooth velvet up stroking up her spine, as Nyd faltered and tried to process exactly what the fuck was happening. He bowed and then uncurled, moving as sinuously and gracefully as a cat stretching, leaving Nyd’s mouth completely dry. “Until such a time as you choose to release me from it. I am your man, without reservation… this I swear.”

 _How does he know my name??!_ Hope filled her again.

 _Because it was in the assassin’s contract, you fucking imbecile,_ she found out a seconds later. And he’d just accepted it, not wondering if it was destiny for them to be bought together. Because the name ‘Nydhalan Surana’ meant nothing more to him than gold. And it was clear, throughout his laughable treatment of her this entire conversation, that he flirted with her because he could, because he thought it would turn her head and help him live longer. Because she held all the power in his life-or-death situation, but her feelings were ultimately meaningless and insignificant to him otherwise.

As they got on the road again - having picked the bodies of all of Zevran’s colleagues clean with little to no comment from him - Nyd watched the eyes of her soulmate linger appreciatively on the curves of Morrigan’s excellent, extremely bony ass.

 _The world isn’t fair,_ she thought angrily, where moments ago she might’ve considered the universe extremely generous and giving, to present her with an Antivan sex god and wrap him up with a bow of destiny.

Because there was Zevran Arainai - a person she wasn’t ashamed to admit she’d imagined as, perhaps, a mousy bespectacled librarian gathering dust in Treviso while nursing a love of Antivan poetry - looking instead like he was freshly birthed from the pages of one of her romance novels, with a few of her sexiest fantasies sprinkled over the top as seasoning. 

But there, also, was Nydhalan… who was very much not a romance heroine. Nydhalan was _not_ sexy. She did not have a figure that was curvy in a way that was also somehow skinny and therefore pleasing, or smouldering violet eyes not obscured by thick bottle glasses, or long blonde hair soft and smooth as silk. She was short, dumpy, brown and plain. 

He had no way of knowing she was his soulmate, and she had no way of proving it to him. Neither of them had names to show the other. There was no reason she could give to him to make him believe her, if she felt bold enough to tell him.

 _He’d laugh at me if I said anything,_ she thought, as they set off and she refused to look in his direction. He’d never believe he was the soulmate of someone who looked like her. He’d think it was all the flimsy, romantic delusion of some pathetic, desperate, sex-starved little girl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... close... to... kisses! I plan to deliver the last two chapters of this fic all this week, so fingers crossed they're worth the wait!
> 
> I hope you liked a brief glimpse into Nydhalan's backstory :)


	8. Chapter Eight

_I’ve trapped this man._ Nydhalan thought wretchedly, as she watched Zevran grow increasingly, increasingly desperate, throwing himself at her as if _she_ was the one with the power to refuse, in this impossible, absurd situation. _Her_. Who thought _she_ was worth fighting over? Worth dying over? No one in their right mind.

The soulmate bond was broken. Malfunctioning. Wynne knew it too - that’s why she wasn’t saying anything. She _knew_. That was one of Nydhalan’s first, brightest memories: a kindly woman holding her hand, taking her into a chamber. A flash of white light, creating after-images that scorched her vision even when her eyes were open. The pain that followed on its heels, seconds after. And Wynne _knew_ Nydhalan had burnt that book in the circle, she _had to know_ Nydhalan knew. 

But she kept it all quiet. Because she knew Nydhalan would soon expire. Or because something was very, very _wrong_.

It was the taint, or something - the mutation in her blood. If someone had told her that she and Zevran were destined to be platonic soulmates - blood-brothers, allies in war - she would’ve immediately believed them. She liked him so much. He made her laugh. His stories filled all the blank spaces she felt so keenly in her own life. He had the kind of sunny face that made her fight a smile just from looking at it, and he always seemed to know what she was thinking (although, thankfully, not _everything_ she was thinking.) She could always trust him to have her back in battle. He always seemed to know when she was in danger. He made her feel safe.

But now everything was breaking apart and there was _absolutely no way he could want her_. But he did want her, growing more and more frantic, more desperate. And she was weak. The months of flirtation… it felt nice, to play pretend at being wanted. It was a selfish secret, to hold this amount of power over someone else. To feel beautiful and desired from the mere touch of his eyes on her. 

That evening in her tent, when he had stroked her cheek, his hand had been trembling, with something close to reverence. A single word, and he’d stopped, obedient to her every command. It was a heady thing - Nyd thought that even making a pact with a demon wouldn’t have left her feeling so powerful.

But that realisation was what told her that something was _definitely_ wrong.

Nyd knew what she was. She’d heard the taunts from other children, watched the faces of adults as they made a sad search for half-compliments. Eavesdropped on the off-hand comments made by templars on their breaks, as they assessed the mages around them like livestock at a market. She was ugly. She was plain. She was in no way desirable. She’d taken those facts and transformed them into the other statements that she hoped to make memorable about herself: she was unbearably, insufferably intelligent. She was powerful. She was the best mage of her Tower. The easiest, cleanest, quickest Harrowing of a generation.

She was going to die in a year, or in twenty, the darkspawn blood crawling through her system like a slick, living thing. Corrupting everything about her and rebuilding her into a new monster. She was already barren - she hadn’t had a period in months. And the dreams were getting worse. She was half afraid they’d drive her mad.

Who would want her? No one in their right mind.

The bond was broken.

 _I will not drag him down with me,_ she promised herself, that night as the rain fell on their tent canvas and she fought desperately not to feel the heat flowing off his gorgeous, perfect body all but three inches away. She’d indulged in it all too much, like she was living in a fantasy. But this was not a romance novel. There was no way this ended happily.

She would keep him safe from whatever cruel, twisted fate the Maker was trying to force onto them, made worse by Darkspawn corruption. Because nothing natural could make Zevran love her like this, and nothing natural could leave her feeling this wild and reckless and undone around him.

_I’ll keep him away from me. Keep him safe._

She remembered what Jowan - well, ‘Jowan’ - had said to her within the Temple of Sacred Ashes: 

“You have come so far since I saw you last. The last vestiges of your shackled life in the Circle have all but fallen away.” 

Then, the vision had looked over to Zevran, “You only have a few more left to break.”

She’d glanced over in tandem with the spirit, and seen Zevran’s beautiful, mahogany eyes staring at her in adoration. He and Cathaire wore a similar expression a lot, these days. This - the soulmate bond - was a magic that seemed stronger and somehow crueller than any she’d encountered yet. She’d guiltily turned back to look at Jowan as he spoke again in that same placid voice. “You are free from the past, and nothing will hold you back as you move forward. Be strong, my friend, do not be afraid. Do not falter.”

Be strong. Don’t give in. This was another trap. Something that had warped to become a prison. And she’d help them both escape it.

Only, apparently, she was as bad at evading magical traps as she was the real ones that had bought them together, because Zevran had been injured by her injury just a month later - despite her _never having let herself touch him_. Surely, that proved the bond was warped? Broken? Perverted?

“I thought he flirted so much because he _hadn’t_ bedded you yet,” Morrigan remarked as they bathed. Nyd had learned to numb herself to the discomfort and shame that came from bathing near Morrigan - learned to silence all of her mind's comparisons between her rounded, dumpy physique and the apostate’s willowy, flawless figure with its acres of porcelain skin. On the apostate's arm, under the wraps, was a name she couldn’t read, in a script similar to Ancient Tevene, but seemingly even more archaic to the point of incomprehension. “When did you both manage to sneak off and consummate the soulmate tether, hmmm? From what my mother says of it, there’s no way it could be so strong to inflict pain without such a level of intimacy. I do suppose the bond explains everything else, however. I thought it strange how he pursued you so doggedly all those months…”

 _Because of course, there’s no other way he’d want me without it,_ Nyd thought bitterly, mind racing as Morrigan continued blithely on. Things were getting out of hand. 

She’d have to tell Zevran to leave.

But she’d never had the chance. No, it had all blown up in her face. Wynne had overheard that entire mortifying conversation, and she’d done what she always did - _meddled_. And now Zevran knew and he was angry and he was… he was…

 _Kissing her_.

Zevran strode towards her, the same angry, despairing look on his face as he’d had for their entire argument and her inadequate confession. He bracketed both sides of her face with his beautiful callused hands, fingers threading deep into her hair, and roughly yanked her face towards his.

Nyd opened her mouth to make an indignant protest, but his lips sealed over hers before she could manage more than incoherent noise. Her glasses were shunted backwards uncomfortably against her nose and cheekbones as he pressed, all lips and teeth, against her. When she tried to pull away his hands stubbornly anchored her there, digging deeper into her curls, and he ran his tongue along her bottom lip like he was tasting her. She made another sound, this one distressingly like a whimper. It seemed to undo him: he panted open-mouthed against her lips, shuddering and swallowing nervously before pressing in again with lips and tongue and teeth like he could eat up the sound. Nothing about his actions were gentle. They were hungry and desperate. Nyd could feel her own defences crumbling. In fact, she'd forgotten precisely why she was fighting. Every nerve in her body felt pressed against the surface of her skin, and they were all on fire.

Zevran felt the moment when the tension leaked from her, when her body began to surrender to the sensation. With a groan of appeal, he pressed his lips against hers as if to open them, but then pulled back. Her eyes - when had she shut her eyes? - snapped open, her angry and disbelieving gaze meeting his hungry one, glaring. Why the fuck had he stopped?

But the moment he’d seemingly confirmed he had her absolute attention, he smirked lazily and simply manoeuvred her head with his hands, steering her to a new angle, and pressed down against her once more.

This time, her lips parted under his with no resistance, and his assault started in earnest. Nydhalan wasn’t so virginal that she hadn’t kissed before - although, admittedly, her experience extended to a few dares (in which she was always picked by the darer, like she was some kind of forfeit), and that one drunken fumble with Anders that had been mostly for curiosity’s sake, and ended in under roughly five minutes once they realised they both liked each other far too much as friends. She thought, at least, she knew how to kiss. She knew that Zevran certainly did - he’d had _tutors_ , and not just the creepy, kinky dungeon kind. 

But nothing about this was experience. It was all instinct. She breathed when he did, mouth parting to swallow the sounds she somehow made him make. When there was a taste she wanted, she chased it with her tongue. When the feeling of his lips grew too delicious, she bit down and he murmured his approval in broken Antivan, the words incoherently mumbled into the kiss.

At some point - when he’d moved to her ear, letting her catch a much-needed breath - the frame of her glasses bit uncomfortably into his cheek. He leaned back, and plucked them gently off her face, snapping the frames shut one-handedly and slotting them into his now thoroughly mangled shirt collar. He was so close to her, he only became slightly blurry at the edges. She blinked up at him while he took a beat: examined her, analysing and taking in what he had done to her. He hesitated. She thought, perhaps, he gave her a moment to make a refusal. 

_Why would I refuse?_ she wondered. Nydhalan was a very clever girl. She knew there was a reason that she'd had before, but it had clearly been a very stupid reason, when she felt this good.

She supposed her face looked rather pleading by the end of his assessment. He darted in and descended on her mouth again. This time she brought her arms up to meet him, hugging him and pulling him close and finally touching all the soft skin and gorgeous muscle she’d been fighting to keep her hands off of _for months_.

She felt something hit her back - a rough, harsh surface that snagged on the fabric of her shirt. A tree. He’d pressed her into a tree. _This is some Dalish-type bullshit,_ she thought for all of a second, remembering all the elf romances she’d read by racist Orlesians, that couldn’t imagine two knife-ears fucking without foliage involved. Then, he was leveraging the support at her back to press more closely against her, every single one of her soft angles flush against his harsh, flat, strong ones. A knee was insinuated between her legs, and suddenly trees were the best thing ever. She gasped as she ran her hands up his arms, along the curving swoop of his shoulders, down his back, over his ass - his perfect ass, the source of much of her frustration, and her fantasies, for the past few months. She dug some nails in as she pulled him against her. He groaned, brokenly, jerked her against his thigh to provide just the barest whisper of friction. Which made her whimper, which made him groan again, and everything just felt wonderful.

 _Should I be self-conscious?_ she thought distantly as she bit down on his lip, hands still greedily gripping his ass. This unashamed groping felt like the sort of thing she’d normally be self-conscious about. She had no idea _what_ she was doing. And yet, she knew _exactly_ what to do next. Kissing him felt as natural as breathing.

Zevran traced a path to her neck, licked a line up her throat that made her jerk and flounder in his grip, dragging herself shamelessly along his thigh. That brushed her against something - something she thought might _just_ be important - and his forehead suddenly collapsed against her shoulder with a curse in Antivan. Then another phrase in Antivan, as he stroked his hands up her waist (there was no real curve there, but it tickled).

Then her name. 

Then the phrase again, repeated, whispered in her ear, desperate.

Then, in Common: “Nydhalan, I love you.”

Nyd froze up.

 _Oh no_. But she was - but she was supposed to not be- _This was very much not keeping him at a distance!!_

Zevran felt her tense. He pulled back from her, giving her an inch space - although she noted that he kept a hand on her waist and the other caging her in against the tree, which meant she was given distance but absolutely no chance to escape.

The words he’d just whispered to her were written plainly in his gaze. _Nydhalan, I love you_. “But - but you can’t!” she hissed back.

He narrowed his eyes angrily, “stop deciding what I can’t do. You’ve never even consulted me on the subject.”

“It’s - it’s just the bond! The bond’s gone wrong. It’s not real!”

He cocked his head. “Does anything about this,” he murmured, taking a single finger and running it along her jawline, and then down the centre of her throat to the patch of exposed skin above the buttons on her shirt, slow enough to make her become racked with shivers, “feel wrong to you?”

“Of course it doesn’t, you bastard. But none of this has anything to do with the fact that you are professionally seductive!”

“This isn’t me, Nydhalan,” he smirked, as she fought to stop panting. “Well, maybe it is a little.” He ran the same finger sideways along her collarbone (how he knew where her collarbone was, she had no idea, it wasn’t like it was visible). He pulled her shirt collar with him, exposing her shoulder to the night air. “This is _us_.”

“...Us?”

“...What did you think a soulmate would feel like, exactly?”

“I- I-” Nydhalan didn’t know what to say. It was obviously described in ridiculous, florid detail in all the books she’d read, with lots of heaving bosoms and soul-searing and ‘feelings of rightness’. So far, well, it all kind of… tracked. But that was… that was _stories_. It didn’t happen like that in real life, and certainly not to people like her. 

But... she’d lived among mages, so no one really knew what it was like when they found their soulmate. They never got the chance.

“I still think this… this should probably be platonic!” she eventually stuttered.

Zevran chuckled darkly, the sound coiling sinuously down Nydhalan’s spine and making her unconsciously bite her lip. “Oh, _do_ you now?”

He paused, to examine her for a moment. Then bit down on her exposed shoulder, and she gave an indignant yelp that kind of slid more towards the territory of a moan by its end.

“Yes,” he murmured against her skin, licking the spot where his teeth had dug in, “you’re completely right. This is doing _absolutely nothing for me_.”

“Zevran... Zevran!” she panted, putting her hands on his shoulders and only at the last minute remembering she wanted to push him away, not pull him closer. “I’m serious! We shouldn’t! I’m a Grey Warden, my biology is all fucked up. I'm probably going to die, and I won’t live long if I don't! And things will… it’ll hurt you, when I’m-”

He stilled, and looked up at her. Watching him draw his open mouth away from her flesh did obscene things to her nerves, and the look on his face told her he was watching it all happen. “If our time is short,” he said, sincerely, “and we are already committed to the pain, then _why_ deny us this pleasure any longer?”

“Because you… you shouldn’t be feeling this in the first place! I’m telling you, the bond is wrong!”

He sighed, a heavy, long sigh. Then he pulled back. “Nydhalan. Do you like me?”

“I - of course I like you! You’re smart, you’re funny, and you look like porn!”

He grinned for a second at her aggressive praise, abashed and a little stunned, like he genuinely hadn’t known that was how she felt. “Well, I like you.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I do.”

“No you-”

“Nydhalan,” he silenced her with a glare. And yes, she had to admit that was a slightly childish way to escalate the argument. “All the nosey mages we know seem to think we’ve had sex, but from what I can gather, bonds such as these deepen through intimacy. I have watched you kill ten men in under ten seconds. I have listened to your stories and your arguments… Maker preserve me, I have even listened to you rant to Alistair about cheese. You saw my worst moments in the Fade. I told you of the ones you didn’t see, when I’ve never told anyone anything of the like. I am currently watching you turn bright red right this moment, and wondering just how far that flush spreads. I. like. You. I _love_ you.”

“Bu-”

“And quite frankly, I find it offensive that you would think me shallow enough to ever entertain that, for me, a soulmate bond would be cancelled out by how you seem to think you look.” He waggled his eyebrows at her, smile glinting in the dark, “you might be able to simply use me for my body and my roguish good looks, but _I_ personally tend to seek out a deeper, emotional connection.”

“I - you - you _fucker_ ,” Nyd fumed, hoping the night hid most of her blush even though he said he could already see it. Stupid elvish darkvision. 

“I was not looking for a soulmate. I certainly would’ve liked a consultation on the matter, sometime before now. And I perhaps would’ve liked the person in question to be as twice as intelligent as the thought they were, not half-”

“Excu-”

“-But I am glad I have found one, in you,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. He leaned forward, and kissed her once, in a positively chaste manner. Nyd embarrassed herself by chasing his mouth unthinkingly when he broke away, and he looked insufferably pleased again. He dropped another peck on her nose as a reward. “Particularly as it proves that the last six months have not simply been the product of a wild, wilful, and over-productive imagination. You, woman, have been driving me mad.”

“I- I was just trying to-”

“Yes, yes, I plan to make you apologise profusely to me about it all, for at least a month,” he grinned. “But right now, there are far more fun things we could be doing, and really, I’d rather have this bond deepen on me for all the good, enjoyable reasons, and not simply you getting decapitated by ogres. I don't think my heart could take it.”

“I- I’m not having sex with you!” she blurted, before hastily clarifying, “um. Not tonight! I mean.”

He chuckled, pressed a kiss to her jaw, and then another, and another, until he was near her mouth again. “Really, my dear, formidable Nydhalan - is that all you think about? And people say _I_ have a one-track mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost at the end! *sob* 
> 
> Perhaps Zevran should've been more angry about being lied to, but honestly, I think when presented with the chance to finally be with his love interest he lowkey just... wouldn't care :')
> 
> Author's note for anyone interested: I decided that Morrigan's soulmark indicated a platonic bond with Kieran (or the Old God inside of him). Makes sense for how Morrigan and Flemeth would know/plan for her to sacrifice herself in the ritual in the final act of DA:O to create Kieran in the first place. Also I tend to imagine Morrigan as aromantic because I hate the way her personality becomes so inauthentic, and feels almost performed, in her romance plotline in Origins.


	9. Chapter Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: There is sex, but I think it counts as fade to black?

Zevran watched with a small smile as Nyd took a drink from her cup, pushed her glasses further up her nose in a fashion that told him it was forced, and then said, “call.”

“Oh, really, sweet thing”? Isabela asked from across the table, looking down at her own hand of cards. She then dragged her gaze back to Nydhalan, and her eyes held a syrupy quality that was blatantly flirtation, “you seem a little... uncertain. Are you sure?”

“I suppose,” Nyd said carefully, in the tone of voice that told Zevran she was lying. The tips of her ears were also going red, but he thought that was probably from the wine, not the bluff, or even the flirtation. When they'd arrived in Denerim, she’d had her hair cut short - shorter than his own, even. Though he'd been sad her lose the heavy mane, she’d explained that long hair and exploding broodmothers had mixed so badly as to cause her nightmares. Her curls now stood in an explosion around her head that vaguely resembled a quiff, or at least went in a quiff-like direction. Eamon had gotten her new clothes too: a dark green blouse that brought out her eyes even from behind her spectacles, and sinfully tight trousers that Zevran thoroughly approved of.

He sat next to her on their bench in the Pearl, angled sideways so he could watch every move. He wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to observe Nydhalan Surana's demeanour as she adapted to a brothel. When she’d first arrived - his Grey Warden, still so timid until one meticulously dismantled her walls - she hadn’t known where to look. Now she was three cups in, and she’d started openly ogling some of the half-naked whores that walked around offering patrons drinks, and themselves. He noted with interest that gender didn’t seem to matter to the direction of her gaze. She lost one round of Wicked Grace to Isabela, and he was sure that the presence of one spectacularly pretty elf (who was probably under Isabela’s employ for the night) walking past the table had been the cause of her defeat. 

But she had recovered her composure, and won the next round. Everything rested on this final hand.

Why Nyd wanted him to have lessons to hone his dual wielding techniques further, Zevran wasn’t certain. He thought it was perhaps because she planned to keep him with her, when she finally came up against this archdemon they were chasing. She wanted him by her side. Until the very end, and beyond it.

A couple of minutes later, after the bet had escalated to Isabela also paying their tab for the night alongside giving two weeks of lessons for free, the pirate smoothed her cards down on the table. “Read them and weep!” she crowed. It was, admittedly, a pretty strong hand.

Zevran glanced to Nyd, already fighting a grin.

“Oh no.” His Warden deadpanned, “whatever shall I do?”

And then she laid out her own hand: the strongest possible in the game.

Everyone in their party had long-since learned: Nydhalan was an absolute fiend at cards. Every single one of her nervous tics had been deliberately play-acted, to throw Isabela of her guard. Zevran positively _loved_ this woman.

Even Isabela was looking impressed, nodding her head to acknowledge her defeat. Her gaze heated, arousal seemingly triggered by the unexpected challenge. “I am fairly won, my dear… And so, what would you do with your prize, sweet Warden?”

“We’re in Denerim for a few days,” Nyd informed Isabela with a small, triumphant smile that was utterly devoid of understanding. As always, she was oblivious to people flirting with her, especially when they meant it. “If you wouldn’t mind taking an hour or so out of your morning to teach Zevran, I would be most obliged.”

The pirate cast a speculative eye over the both of them, “you should join too. You can watch him, as closely as he’s watching you.”

“Oh, I was already planning on joining the two of you! I’ve never seen the sea, and I really want to, even if it’s just a harbor!” Nyd said with her innocent, goofy grin. Then she paused, and said gently, “you might want to, um, take that card out of your armour, by the way? It seems like it might chafe.”

Isabela grumbled as she removed the dud card she’d slipped down the wrist of her bracer, and put it back in the box with the rest of her Wicked Grace cards. “I suppose I shall go add more to this tab I will have to pay. What are you drinking, sweet thing?”

“Red wine, please!”

As the pirate walked away, she swayed her hips deliberately in what Zevran knew, from their earlier dalliances, to be the Provocative Walk, honed by the _Siren's Call_ 's captain for a specific purpose. He leaned in and whispered, “she wants to bed you, Nydhalan.”

“No she doesn’t! Don’t be absurd. She’s the one bringing up all your past encounters, and offering lessons and playing these cardgames for ‘old times sake’.” Nyd's voice sounded flustered, but not affronted or jelaous. She took a sidelong glance at him, biting her lip. Her ears got redder as she said, “you can, um. Sleep with her. If you wanted to. I wouldn’t. Um. Mind. I know you used to... with more than one… I don’t want you to feel like you need to change, for the sake of the bond, if you… um… like multiple people. I don't, really. But. Um. That would be. Um. Fine.”

Zevran grinned as Nydhalan talked herself into knots, as she always did when trying to articulate anything about desire. He really thought that the Circle bred an unhealthy attitude towards sex. The first time he’d coaxed Nydhalan to climax, she’d huffed, “ _Maker!_ ” into his shoulder in a small, shuddering voice, and then fallen quiet for nearly five minutes, clearly trying to calibrate a number of things she’d only just learnt about her own body. He was pretty certain that was the longest she’d ever been silent in his company.

“A gracious offer, but I do not think she is after me alone. She wants us both, my dear,” he bit gently into her ear and Nyd inhaled loudly, tensing under the hand lightly resting on her thigh. “She probably wonders what talents the wanton sex goddess who has tamed the mighty Zevran Arianai has, in her repertoire.”

“Oh, fuck off,” she said, pressing an almost angry kiss to his lips abruptly before pulling back. “I don’t like girls.”

“Oh, I think you might like girls a little,” he confided, glancing meaningfully at the woman who had lost Nydhalan her first hand, as she walked past the table again and gave them both an unrepentant wink. Nydhalan flushed, and Zevran took pity on her, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “But we have our whole lives to discover such things, no? Why would I want to sleep with a woman I’ve already had, when my very own soulmate sits next to me, positively tipsy?”

“I am not-” and then Nydhalan hiccuped.

“You are adorable, my little Warden,” Zevran grinned, and as she started saying, “as if I’ve ever been little-” he kissed her again.

Tipsy Nydhalan was absolutely everything he’d ever hoped for. Though their party knew they were in a relationship, she was still reserved, usually, with him in public. He knew it was… because she thought about the way passers-by might treat them in the street. That every stranger who encountered the pair of them thought them an oddly matched couple. Such things still baffled him: most people were looking at her these days because she was the upstart, Circle-less mage wrecking nobleman’s houses, breaking out of prisons, and supporting a bastard’s bid to the throne - they didn't give two shits about him. But there was only so much he could talk her out of, and only so much about her anxieties he could hope to understand. 

But by her sixth glass, Nyd was getting handsy, snuggling against his side and burrowing her nose into the hollow of his neck while he tried to continue his conversation with Isabela and, he was embarrassed to say, kept failing, spectacularly. On her seventh glass, she started whispering all the Antivan she’d learnt second-hand from him in his ear. And because Zevran, fool that he was, tended to only say dirty things to her in his native tongue, he was gradually losing any remnants of his concentration or control. She had even worked out herself how to switch the pronouns and conjugations, being the insufferable know-it-all he knew and loved.

“Antivan is pretty similar to archaic Tevene,” she said, smugly planting a kiss on his cheek, when one of her more complex sentences came out flawlessly, and his breathing hitched, hand tightening dangerously on her knee.

“I like her, immensely,” Isabela told him, when he finally gave up and told Nyd to go to the restroom before they began making their hasty retreat to Eamon's estate. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile half this much, or half as obnoxiously.”

Zevran beamed back at her, just to prove a point. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning, Isabela.”

“ _If_ you’ve had a good enough night’s rest, and I'm not quite sure that will be the case. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, sweetheart!” Bela laughed, knowing exactly how broadly those final instructions could be interpreted.

Nydhalan took his hand in hers, interlocking their fingers, as they started their walk home through the night streets of Denerim and she gave him a slurred monologue about a book she’d happened to read, on the history of piracy across the Par Vollen coast. While he listened, Zevran thought back to what Isabela had said about his smile. Zevran had never been a particularly sad or morose individual, but he found himself wondering if he had ever been quite this happy, at any other point when he had visited the city. As he’d said to Nydhalan nearly two months ago, he’d never particularly sought out his soulmate, figuring it was simply not the type of thing he was destined for. But it tasted pretty sweet, for him to have found it, all the same. 

He always took whatever opportunities were offered, and this was not a chance he was about to squander.

When they made it back to the servant’s entrance of Eamon’s estate - it wasn’t an elf thing, it was just the only door they knew would be open at this hour - Zevran got the shock of his life as Nydhalan pushed him under the eave where the cooks took their tobacco breaks, pressed him against the wall, and kissed him. Every wish he’d had about his Warden tipsy was granted - she’d never acted so boldly before. Even so, her lips were gentle and languid, like he was a snowflake about to dissolve on her tongue. She was on her tiptoes, her chest pressed against his and forcing him into the stone, and he stroked a smooth line down her spine that made her smile against his mouth.

She pressed even higher, breaking the kiss to wrap her arms around him and hug him close, enveloping him in tender warmth. “I want you,” she whispered in his ear, in Antivan.

And Zevran - vaunted professional assassin, seducer of dozens, nay _hundreds_ , if you included all the hearts he inadvertently broke along the way - nearly choked. He thought he might have swallowed some of her hair, even though it was short now. He started coughing and hacking, until Nyd ducked back, looking concerned. 

“Zevran… are you ok?”

“I…” he cleared his throat, his heart pounding like some green teenager. “I’m fine, darling Nydhalan, I just… I never expected... but I should’ve, I suppose... You are a fast learner, and half the stuff you said in the Pearl was twice as-”

“-Oh, Maker’s balls,” she said, pouting as she folded her arms. “Did I fucking pronounce it wrong?”

“I... excuse me?”

“Bollocks. Of all the things...” she said, and then scrunched up her face in familiar determination, pushed her glasses up. Not breaking eye contact with him, she sounded something out much more tentatively in Antivan, placing a different emphasis on the same words she’d said before, “I… _love_ you.”

Zevran froze in place. Pressed himself against the wall, as if he was on a mission and trying to evade detection. In truth, she'd made his knees weak - _his knees_ , like he was some anaemic romance heroine, prone to fainting at the drop of a hat! He couldn’t seem to stand without the stone’s support.

“Oh Maker, did I get it wrong again? It’s… it’s what _you_ said, right? When we…”

“No,” he whispered fiercely, “it was _perfect_.”

And he grabbed her, and kissed her.

They smashed inelegantly through the servants quarters, barely making it twenty feet without being drawn together by some magnetic force and kissing each other fiercely, again. Nyd’s glasses were fogged and askew on her nose, Zevran’s top four buttons undone, before they made it up the stairs. Once they made it onto the floor containing the guest quarters - and had passed by an incredibly unimpressed-looking Anora Mac Tir in her dressing gown - he dragged her into an alcove with a small bureau, to plunder her mouth with his tongue while she panted brokenly. And then he-

“No, Zevran!” she said, encircling his questing wrists with her fingers. “Don’t you dare!”

“Oh, I dare.”

“No! You! ...I absolutely cannot handle the indignity of breaking my boyfriend’s back, just because he's an idiot who insisted on carrying me, even when I weigh a tonne!”

“I assure you, my beautiful Warden, I am very strong.”

“If you were _Sten_ maybe, but you’re fucking _tiny_ and I - ah!” she yelped, as he stopped listening, and acted. He picked her up, leaving her no choice but to wrap her lovely thick legs, in their very tight trousers, around his waist. He let out a small huff of exertion, but it was more than worth it to have her face level with his. She blinked down at him dazedly as - with this small gesture - her eyes darkened, her pupils blown. 

Zevran grinned at her triumphantly, before kissing her again and groaning at her renewed enthusiasm. He’d had a feeling this was something novels might have instilled as a fantasy within her.

Arm muscles screaming, he nevertheless managed the walk three doors down to his chamber, kicking the door open (having left it unlocked in preparation). As it swung shut behind them, he gave her one last, deep kiss with them at equal height, that tested the very edges of his stamina, before tossing her down onto the bed. “I told you I was strong enough,” he murmured smugly, as he plopped himself down on top of her, enjoying the softness and strength of muscle as she wrapped herself around him, stroked his hair back from his face, and sighed.

“If you can’t attend the fucking duelling lesson I won for you tomorrow because you did something as pedestrian as pulling a muscle…”

“I’ll make it up to you.” he plucked her glasses from her face, rested them gently on his bedside table. Looked down at her, spread across his covers. Wild dark hair and bright jade eyes. The dream he’d never known he had. “I'll always make it up to you. Beautiful, formidable Nydhalan.”

He kissed her to silence, then began coaxing out the noises he was pretty certain no one but him had ever had the privilege of hearing. They were quiet, so quiet, even through the thin canvas walls of a tent. As she began removing his shirt, he wondered if he could ask her to say it again. 

It took being fully seated in her to find the courage.

And she did.

“I love you, Zevran,” she gasped into his hair. “I love you.”

Three days later, Tailesin found him, as Zevran expected he might, and Nydhalan ended his life swiftly, as he’d always known she would.

“It is official, I suppose - I am no longer a Crow!” he smiled, smudging the blood affectionately off her cheek with his thumb as they walked back to Eamon’s residence. 

“Yes,” she said, smiling back. Her expression was a little tinged with something sorrowful, and he knew what she was going to offer, before she spoke. “You know. The oath you made me, it doesn’t really count either, really. I meant what I said in Orzammar. Some of it, anyway. So if you want to… you know… go somewhere else… you can, um-”

He silenced her foolish offer with a kiss. For the longest time, Nydhalan’s tired and exasperated reactions towards his flirting made him think that the last thing she needed was constant reassurance that he loved her. He’d soon realised that in fact the opposite was true, as much as she tried to pretend to the contrary.

“Look, I just don’t want you to think of this bond as some kind of… as some kind of prison. You told me once that you wanted to be free - you can be, if you’d like. You can go away,” she glimpsed his stormy expression and hastily added, “and _come back_ , obviously! It's just! We won’t need to live in each other’s pockets!”

“A reasonable proposition, were you not about to single-handedly fight the King of Darkspawn. You are a fool, if you think I’m leaving you now. The oath I made you... well, looking back, I was basically declaring you my soulmate. Because I am obviously far cleverer than you will ever be, and clearly knew from the very beginning without needing anything in writing, my darling Warden. I’m with you to the end… provided you do not tire of me first. Do you tire of me?”

He liked a little reassurance, too. From time to time.

“Of course not! And if you think you’re getting out of being my tour guide in Antiva when all this is over _that_ easily…”

He kissed her again. “I would never dream of it. I am your man, without reservation, until you die. Or I die. And saving the world seems like quite a worthy vocation to pick, once one has the free will to do so, no?” he smiled down at her. His heart felt light in his chest, in a way it never had, when she beamed back. 

“I was simply commenting that I am no longer beholden to the Crows, or their rules. Which means…”

He told her his plan, and watched as her face went from guarded to timidly, heartbreakingly hopeful. “We… um… we don’t have to,” she murmured, and he kissed her again, because why would she think he didn’t want to do it, when _he_ had offered it to _her_ , in the first place?

The next morning, they met Isabela on the deck of the _Siren’s Call_ for his next lesson, and afterwards asked if she had a tattooist on board. She bought the man above deck, and mimed gagging behind his back when she overheard their joint request to him. 

“You can’t be serious!” she muttered, as the man got out his implements and ink. She looked down at her own wrist, which - Zevran was amused, and Nyd alarmed, to note - was inscribed with the name _Eugenia Hawke_.

“I am no longer a Crow, Isabela,” Zevran explained to his friend, “this is no longer a weakness.”

“And, if you must know, I _have_ verified it through third party sources,” Nydhalan said haughtily. Her bluster was belied by how she fidgeted awkwardly in her seat, as if waiting with dread for the pirate to make some kind of comment.

“It’s not, you know, the logic - you two are clearly made for each other! - it’s the _principle_ of the thing! It’s just so… bleugh,” Isabela said, with a shudder. “All those shitty romance serials you used to think I couldn’t see you reading, Zevran, have clearly gone to your head.”

Zevran laughed when he saw Nydhalan's expression. His love was staring at him so wide-eyed for the next hour, that she didn't even notice when the tattooist started writing his name on her wrist.

And so their scars were each erased, and the names, once written on their skin by fate, written there once more by choice. In a much nicer cursive script than the naturally occuring kind, Zevran couldn’t help but think, as he traced the curving loops of Nydhalan’s name with his thumb.

“You know,” she said, looking down at their matching bandages afterwards. “I can’t help but think it would be more romantic, if we… you know… _weren’t_ soulmates.”

“Cruel, cruel woman!” he announced loudly to the air, “Will you _ever_ be satisfied?! You are gifted with an Antivan sex god as your fated partner/ You mark him as your own, so that no one else may have him - breaking millions of hearts across the lands of Thedas! And yet _still_ you want more! Will your rampant desires and wicked wills ever be sated!?”

“ _Zevran_ ,” she hissed angrily, glancing around as several sailors and dockhands cast them amused looks as they passed. “I swear, with the Maker as my witness, I _will_ feed you to an archdemon, if it has a hope of teaching you humility.”

Zevran dragged her into an alley and silenced her with a kiss, which became an embrace until they both flinched and Nyd’s head smacked back into a wall with a gasp of pain. The tender skin on their arms was preventing them from holding each other too close.

Standing in a refuse-filled alley, with the woman he loved in his arms and her name burning into his wrist. It was a decent way to start the rest of his life, Zevran supposed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zevran: "Nydhalan is very reserved and does not like public displays of affection except when she is tipsy"  
> Zevran/Nydhalan: *literally kiss, anywhere and everywhere, throughout this chapter*
> 
> (AKA, my first attempt at unreliable narration xD)
> 
> And there it is: my first ever completed fanfic!! I hope you all had as much fun reading it as I have had writing it 🥰 🥰 🥰
> 
> If you enjoyed this story, please let me know either by comments or kudos. Normally I wouldn't ask for them directly, but all of the feedback received will directly influence my motivation to complete my other fics, including an Alistair/Warden arranged marriage AU I've got brewing in my drafts. So, if you like my writing and want more of it, it directly benefits you to give me the spoons to produce more!
> 
> If you want more writing from me in the meantime, I have a behemoth DA:I fic that updates twice weekly, and will hopefully continue to do so until the damn thing is finished.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left comments and kudos already, or who subscribed to this fic. I'm so new to fanfic, and I've loved hearing about all your thoughts and feelings on my work! It's always so weird seeing what gets a reaction out of people, compared to what was important to me at the time of writing!
> 
> See you all soon xoxox


End file.
